Greyfriars and the Covenanters.

If you are visiting Edinburgh one place well worth a visit is Greyfriars kirk. Walt Disney immortalised the place with the film about Greyfriars Bobby but apart from this it has a great deal of interesting history.

These burial crypts from the 17th century were built with stone and iron bars like prison cells, not to keep people locked in but to keep people out. The graveyard is in close proximity to Edinburgh’s old Royal Infirmary and Medical School and was vulnerable to “stiffy-lifters” or “resurrectionists” like Burke & Hare who supplied the doctors there with fresh corpses for dissection. Their downfall came about when they decided to short-circuit the dying process and began murdering victims in the lodging house they ran to cater for the trade.


This is another example of the lengths they went to to keep bodies safe.


And if you weren’t quite so well off you had to settle for the economy version like this.


In the Edinburgh museum these miniature coffins are displayed and each contains a clothed carved wooden figure. They were discovered in a cave on the hill above Edinburgh called Arthur’s seat in the 19th century and while their origin is unknown they number the same as the victims of Burke & Hare and may have been connected in some way.


In the second half of the 17th century the graveyard was used as a prison to hold Scottish Covenanters, many of whom were executed in the nearby Grassmarket. The Covenanters were persecuted mercilessly in what were known as the killing times and the crypts here provided a ready source of secure cells to lock them in. The actual cells have been closed off to the public but are similar to the pictures above. Here is a photo of them through a crack in the barrier.



Lastly here is the monument erected in the graveyard to the memory of those who died during this time