YOUR headline with regard to the National Trust for Scotland's plans to accept donations attempts to make humour of the situation ("Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie... noo we tak yer donations cash free", The Herald, October 9). I believe that the trust has been ill-advised to adopt this course, which I view as being tasteless, gimmicky, and disrespectful.

To portray Burns, the country's national bard and voted the Greatest Scot by viewers of STV in 2009, as a supplicant with his hand out is, in my view, demeaning. Here was a man who once described himself as follows:

My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border, O,

And carefully he bred me to decency and order, O,

He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne'er a farthing, O,

For without an honest manly heart, no man was worth regarding, O.

In so portraying Burns the trust is failing to conform in so many ways with Burns's description of himself.

Turning to Colonel William Gordon (who later became a general) and the contactless reader embedded in his left hand, I believe that, pictured like this in a copy of the painting of him by Pompeo Batoni, it can only make light of him and his career in the Army and Parliament. One wonders where this trivialisation of historic figures is going to end. I would suggest that the trust go home and think again'.

Ian W Thomson,

38 Kirkintilloch Road, Lenzie.