On 3 June, 1774, Paisley poet, Robert Tannahill, was born.

Author of such poems as The Flower of Dunblane and Gloomy Winter's Noo Awa, Tannahill was frail and shy. Despite having a deformed right leg, he was inspired by the countryside around Paisley, where he often went walking. Tannahill became friends with James Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, after he appeared as a guest at Tannahill's Paisley Burns club.

A collection of his works was published in 1807 and they were well received, selling out within weeks. However, Tannahill was prone to depression and, when another group of poems was rejected by the Edinburgh publisher Archibald Constable, he consigned many of his writings to the flames. Tannahill committed suicide by drowning himself in a Paisley canal shortly after, in May 1810.

On this day in 1726 James Hutton, the chemist and geologist, was born. Hutton is regarded as a pioneer of modern geology. At the time of his research, people still widely accepted The Bible's account that the world was only about 6,000 years old.

Geologists believed that rock layers had been laid down during the Biblical floods. Hutton, however, refused to accept that one single event was responsible for the formation of the world as we know it. In his work, Theory of the Earth, he proposed that the Earth's crust had been created through a continuous, gradual process called "uniformitarianism."

On 3 June 1882 James Thomson, the Scottish poet who wrote under the pen-name, BV, died. Thomson's most famous work is the Gothic epic, The City of Dreadful Night.

His pseudonym was used to distinguish him from another James Thomson who wrote, Rule Britannia.

The City of Dreadful Night is inspired by Thomson's own experiences while living in London, where he was raised as an orphan in an asylum. Thomson became an army teacher in Ireland. However, he gave up his post and moved to London on the death of a friend's daughter, with whom he was in love. Thomson's life never recovered from this blow, and his time in in London was lonely and impoverished, where he suffered from insomnia, and battled alcoholism for the remainder of his life.

Today's recipe: it's soft fruit season so time to enjoy this berry bonanza!