Where the Covenant was signed, where the body snatchers worked, and where a small dog became the city's most profitable legend.
A working graveyard since 1561, on ground that had been a Franciscan friary — the Grey Friars — before the Reformation. It is free, it is open, and it holds an unusual amount of Scottish history in about four acres.
The National Covenant
In 1638, in this kirkyard, thousands signed the National Covenant — a document rejecting Charles I’s attempt to impose bishops and an English prayer book on the Scottish church. Some are said to have signed in their own blood.
What followed was the Bishops’ Wars, and from there the civil wars across England, Scotland and Ireland. It is not an exaggeration to say that a chain of events ending with the execution of a king began in this yard.
The Covenanters’ Prison
After the Covenanters’ defeat at Bothwell Brig in 1679, around 1,200 prisoners were held in an open enclosure at the south end of this kirkyard for four months, through a Scottish autumn, with minimal shelter or food. Many died; others were transported and drowned when their ship went down off Orkney.
The enclosure is still there and is kept locked. It can be visited on evening guided tours, which have built a reputation around the Mackenzie Poltergeist — Sir George Mackenzie, the prosecutor known as Bluidy Mackenzie, is buried in the mausoleum beside it. Reports of scratches and fainting are numerous, well documented and entirely unexplained by anything the tour operators can demonstrate. Take it as you find it.
The body snatchers
Edinburgh’s medical school needed corpses and the law supplied very few, so in the early nineteenth century graves here were robbed regularly. The response is visible all over the kirkyard: mortsafes, heavy iron cages and grilles bolted over new graves, plus watchtowers at the gates where families kept vigil until the body was too decayed to sell.
They are the most tangible thing in the kirkyard and most visitors walk past them.
Greyfriars Bobby
A Skye terrier said to have kept vigil at his master’s grave for fourteen years until his own death in 1872. There is a statue at the gate — with a nose polished bright by tourists, which the council has repeatedly asked people to stop doing — and a headstone inside.
The historian Jan Bondeson has argued convincingly that the story was largely constructed by local businessmen, and that there were probably two dogs. The city has not let this affect the merchandise.
The Harry Potter thing
J. K. Rowling wrote in cafés nearby, and the kirkyard contains graves to Thomas Riddell, William McGonagall’s namesake, and a Moodie. Tour groups gather at these stones in large numbers. Rowling has never confirmed the connection. The stones are real graves of real people, which is worth remembering while queuing to photograph one.
More History
The Real Mary King's Close
A seventeenth-century street sealed under the City Chambers, where people went on living after the building was put on top of them.
Old Calton Burial Ground
David Hume's mausoleum, a monument to five reformers transported to Australia, and Abraham Lincoln, all in one small graveyard.