"Miss Fordyce of Ayton" is a Scottish reel in E Minor. The parts are played AB. It was composed by 'Red Rob' Robert Mackintosh (c. 1745–1807), a late 18th century violinist and composer.
The scion of the Fordyce family was an Edinburgh lawyer who bought up the Ayton estate in Berwick along with several other forfeited estates in 1715 in the aftermath of the first Jacobite rebellion. The head of the family at the time of Mackintosh's publication was John Fordyce (1735–1809), a banker whose fortunes took a disastrous turn in 1772. Despite this blow to his reputation his social life did not seem to be irreparably harmed. Boswell saw him in Edinburgh in 1779 and wrote:
I took no manner of notice of him, as I have all along thought that his living in plenty while numbers have been reduced to indigence by him, is (without going deeper) such dishonesty that he ought not to receive any countenance. Besides, his manners are forward and assuming, and he is a fellow of low extraction.
The tune presumably honors one of his daughters, Eglantine, Madeline and Catherine (the youngest daughter, who married in 1803).
It was printed in Glen's The Glen Collection of Scottish Dance Music, vol. 2 (1895) and Mackintosh's Sixty-Eight New Reels, Strathspeys and Quicksteps (1793).
It was recorded by Abby Newton on Castles, Kirks and Caves (2001).