Ayrshire and Arran brings together the historic county of Ayrshire, curving along the Firth of Clyde in three traditional districts, Carrick, Kyle and Cunninghame, with the mountainous island of Arran that lies just offshore, historically reckoned part of neighbouring Buteshire rather than Ayrshire itself. An eighteenth-century account of the mainland shire dwelt on its dairying wealth, above all the cheese of Dunlop, judged the finest made in Scotland and sold as eagerly as the celebrated cheeses of England, and on the distinctive local cattle bred by crossing Galloway stock with the hardier cattle of the western Highlands, the beginning of the breed that would carry the Ayrshire name to dairy farms worldwide.
Arran, separated from Ayrshire's coast by open water and administered historically alongside Bute, offered a landscape in miniature of the wider Scottish Highlands: the granite peak of Goat Fell rising above wooded glens, standing stones on Machrie Moor recalling a prehistoric population, and the King's Cave on its western shore traditionally sheltering Robert the Bruce before his return to claim the Scottish throne. Together, mainland and island offered a striking combination of fertile lowland farming and dramatic upland scenery within sight of one another across the Firth.
Ailsa Craig, the isolated rock rising from the sea between Ayrshire and Arran and let for grazing by its owner the Earl of Cassilis, its cliffs thick with nesting solan geese, exemplified this shared maritime landscape, while Ayr itself, with its ruined Dominican friary and its most famous son, the poet Robert Burns, born at nearby Alloway in 1759, gave the mainland county a literary reputation that has only grown since these eighteenth-century surveys were first written.