Auchinleck is a village five miles south-east of Mauchline, and two miles north-west of Cumnock in East Ayrshire, Scotland.Surrounding the village is Auchinleck Estate, centred on Auchinleck House, past home of the lawyer, diarist and biographer James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck.HistoryAuchinleck is situated at the heart of the ancient Kyle district of Scotland. The place-name means 'field of (flat) stones' in Scottish Gaelic, from ' ('field') and ' ('slab'). The small locality of Auchincloich has a comparable meaning.Although record of a community exists from as early as 1239, reliable records can really only be said to date from the arrival of the Boswell family in 1504. The barony of Auchinleck had been forfeited to the crown and was granted by James IV to his 'good and faithful servant' Thomas Boswell.The Boswells proved to be assiduous in their estate husbandry and by the early 1700s a viable village community and a thriving estate had begun to emerge from the surrounding barren moorland. The New Statistical Account of 1837 documents early mining and quarrying in the area which was to become the impetus for the region to boom. By 1881 the parish population had blossomed and was 6,681, four times what it had been in 1831