David Hume's mausoleum, a monument to five reformers transported to Australia, and Abraham Lincoln, all in one small graveyard.
A small graveyard opened in 1718, cut in two when Waterloo Place was driven through it in 1817, and packed with more consequence per square metre than anywhere else in the city.
David Hume
The philosopher’s mausoleum, a plain circular drum designed by Robert Adam in 1777, is the largest thing here. Hume asked for a monument with only his name and dates, on the grounds that leaving posterity to fill in the rest was the proper test — and that is exactly what is on it.
He died in 1776, cheerfully and openly without religious consolation, which scandalised Edinburgh at the time. Boswell visited him on his deathbed specifically to see whether he would recant and reported, with some distress, that he did not. A watch was kept over the grave for eight nights after burial in case of interference.
The University’s David Hume Tower was renamed in 2020 over his writing on race, and the argument about how to hold both things at once is live in Edinburgh.
The Political Martyrs’ Monument
A 27-metre obelisk to Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, Maurice Margarot and Joseph Gerrald, who in 1793 and 1794 campaigned for parliamentary reform and universal suffrage, were convicted of sedition in trials that were a byword for unfairness even at the time, and were transported to Botany Bay for fourteen years.
The monument was erected in 1844, fifty years later, when the argument had been won.
The Emancipation Monument
A statue of Abraham Lincoln standing above a freed slave, raised in 1893 over the graves of Scottish-American soldiers who died in the American Civil War. It was the first statue of an American president erected outside the United States, and the first American Civil War memorial outside the country.
The figure at Lincoln’s feet has been the subject of considerable recent discussion about how such monuments represent the people they commemorate, and the city has added interpretation.
Also here
Robert Burn’s obelisk, the publisher William Blackwood, and the scientist John Playfair. The Governor’s House of the old Calton Jail looms over the north wall — all that survives of a prison demolished in 1930 to build St Andrew’s House, which is now the Scottish Government’s headquarters.
Practicalities
Free, open in daylight hours, gates locked at dusk. Uneven ground and no facilities. Twenty to thirty minutes.
More History
Greyfriars Kirkyard
Where the Covenant was signed, where the body snatchers worked, and where a small dog became the city's most profitable legend.
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.