Cutty Sark wind. The ship was named after Cutty-sark, the nickname of the witch Nannie Dee in Robert Burns's 1791 poem "Tam o' Shanter". The ship's figurehead, the original of which has been attributed to carver Fredrick Hellyer of Blackwall, is a stark white carving of a bare-breasted Nannie Dee with long black hair holding a grey horse's tail in her hand. In the poem she wore a linen (Scots: a short chemise or undergarment), that she had been given as a child, which explains why it was "cutty", or in other words far too short. The erotic sight of her dancing
River Sark made famous, partially by Robert Burns' poem, "Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation", which in the first verse says: The poem's subject was the alleged sale of Scotland in the Anglo-Scottish Treaty of Union. The most famous town on the Sark is Gretna Green, best known for its wedding industry. The A74 motorway passes over it. The area around the Sark was notoriously marshy and sandy, as much of the coast of the north west Irish Sea is. The small section between the lower end of the Sark and the River Esk is known as the "debatable lands",