Greyfriars Kirkyard: the history, the Covenanters’ Prison and the night tours

Before the Reformation the site was a Franciscan friary garden — the Grey Friars, which is where the name comes from. In 1561 Mary, Queen of Scots granted the ground to the town as a burial place, because St Giles’ churchyard on the Royal Mile was full.

The kirk itself came later, in 1620, and has the distinction of being the first new church built in Edinburgh after the Reformation. In 1638 the National Covenant — the document that defined Scottish religious politics for the rest of the century — was signed there.

What that history leaves on the ground is a kirkyard of unusual density: table tombs, wall monuments, mortsafes, and the watch-house at the gate. The mortsafes and the watch-house both date from the body-snatching years of the 1820s, when medical schools in this city needed subjects and families paid to make sure their own were not among them. Guides use them, quite reasonably, as the most physical evidence in Edinburgh of a period everyone has heard of.

In June 1679 a Covenanter army was defeated at Bothwell Brig. Around twelve hundred prisoners were brought to Edinburgh, and with nowhere to put them the authorities used an enclosure in the south-west corner of Greyfriars Kirkyard. They were held there through the summer and into the autumn.

That enclosure is still there and it is still called the Covenanters’ Prison. It is behind a locked gate, and it is the single strongest argument for taking a guided tour rather than walking round the kirkyard yourself: the gate is opened for authorised guides and for nobody else.

Nearby is the Black Mausoleum of George Mackenzie, Lord Advocate under Charles II, who prosecuted Covenanters and is buried a short walk from the enclosure that held them. Reports of disturbances around the mausoleum date from 1999 and are the basis of most of what is now sold as the haunting. The seventeenth-century politics need no embellishment; the 1999 material is recent folklore and honest guides date it.

If the kirkyard is the thing you actually want, the cheapest route in is the Dark History walking tour at $20. Ninety minutes, above ground throughout, and it covers Greyfriars, the Covenanters’ Prison and the Grassmarket. It holds a perfect 5.0, although across only 72 reviews, which is a small sample and worth saying.

If you want the kirkyard and the underground in one evening, the haunted vaults and graveyard tour at $27 is ninety minutes and does both. 7,277 reviews at 4.6 — the second-most-reviewed tour on this site. For somebody with one free evening in Edinburgh, this is probably the best single purchase available.

If you want two hours and a night walk through kirkyards and closes rather than anything underground, Ghosts, Mysteries and Witches at $22 is rated 4.9 and goes deeper into the witch trials than the others.

Walk round Greyfriars in daylight and you will see heavy iron frames set over or around certain graves, and a small building at the gate. Both belong to the same short period and the same problem.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century Edinburgh had one of the leading medical schools in Europe and a legal supply of cadavers that came nowhere near meeting its teaching demand. The gap was filled unlawfully, and families responded by physically securing new graves: iron mortsafes, weighted covers, and rotas of relatives keeping watch from a purpose-built watch-house until the body was of no further use to anybody.

The Anatomy Act of 1832 changed the law and the practice stopped almost at once. The ironwork stayed, which is why Greyfriars is one of the best places in Britain to see the physical evidence of a period that everyone has heard about and almost nobody has seen traces of.

It is also the least supernatural thing in the kirkyard and the one guides tend to spend least time on, which is a shame — it is a story about ordinary families and a bad law, and the objects are right there.