Jean Gardner
Jean Gardner or later Jean Hill, was "a young woman of very surpassing beauty," with a "light foot and an ensnaring eye," but she may have been thirteen years older than Robert Burns, with whom she was on friendly or 'intimate' terms. A strong local tradition in Irvine links her with Burns, however, no contemporary written evidence records this relationship and Burns himself was not thought to have written about her, other than a disputed use of her given name as the 'darling Jean' of Burns's 'Epistle to Davie', and most recent writers have considered the reference to be to Jean Armour.