The Grassmarket: Edinburgh's Execution Square and the Old Town Underworld

The Grassmarket is a broad open square at the south-west foot of the castle rock, and for close to two centuries it was where Edinburgh did its public hanging. Below the crag where the castle rides, the gallows stood and the city executed its condemned in the open, as a spectacle of law. That single fact is the doorway into a self-guided walk that reads the Old Town's second story, older and grimmer than the painted tourist spine above it. Look underfoot in the square and the whole route opens: a churchyard where a nation signed its defiance, a prison yard with no roof, a beloved dog, an execution ground, the old town gate where real murder was done, and a sunless street beneath the bridges.

A marketplace that was also a killing ground

The Grassmarket was already a suburb and a secondary market place by fifteen hundred, and grain and beasts were sold here well into the twentieth century, a place of noise and bargaining. The trade and the executions ran side by side.

The dead who matter most to this walk are the Covenanters, Presbyterian Scots who refused to accept the king's authority over their Church. Many of them were put to death on this ground between sixteen sixty-one and sixteen eighty-eight, in the years remembered as the Killing Time. These were people executed for their faith, and the tour treats them as people rather than as a thrill. Two markers hold their memory in the paving. A circular memorial was raised here by public subscription in nineteen thirty-seven, funded by the citizens rather than the state. And in a later renovation of the square, a dark shadow of the old gibbet was set into the stones to show exactly where the gallows once stood. Both are easy to walk straight past, which is why the walk asks you to look down.

You will also hear the tale of Margaret Dickson, hanged in seventeen twenty-four and said somehow to have survived. That story belongs more to legend than to certain record, and the tour says so plainly. Holding the beloved story and the documented fact apart, without discarding either, is the discipline that runs through the entire route.

From the square, the layers begin to separate

Walk on and the tension the Grassmarket sets up plays out stop by stop. The steep curve of Victoria Street, one of the most photographed corners of the city, looks medieval but was laid out in the eighteen thirties under Edinburgh's Improvement Act of eighteen twenty-seven, part of the architect Thomas Hamilton's new approaches to the city. It replaced the older twisting West Bow, and its two-level terrace, with an upper walkway above the shops, is part of why the eye loves it. You will hear it called the inspiration for Diagon Alley. Treat that as popular story, layered over an older one.

The heart of the walk is Greyfriars. The kirk was begun in sixteen oh two and completed in sixteen twenty, with worship first held on Christmas Day of that year, on the grounds of a Franciscan friary dissolved around the Scottish Reformation of fifteen sixty. In sixteen thirty-eight the National Covenant was signed here, a pledge by Scots to defend their Presbyterian Church against King Charles the First and Archbishop Laud. By the kirk's own account it was presented and signed in front of the pulpit, on the twenty-sixth of February, and one of the original copies is on display in the kirk's museum. This is where the Grassmarket's dead were, in effect, sentenced: the movement born in this churchyard is the same one whose martyrs were hanged in the square.

The persecution becomes physical a few steps further on. After the Covenanter defeat at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge on the twenty-second of June sixteen seventy-nine, more than a thousand prisoners were held in a section of the kirkyard for over four months, without any shelter, on four ounces of bread a day. The ground lay outside the kirkyard's old south wall, bounded by the wall of George Heriot's School and the Telfer Wall, and in November the last two hundred and fifty-seven were shipped for the colonies. The nearby Martyrs' Monument names Covenanters executed in those years, among them James Guthrie, James Renwick, and the Marquis of Argyll. Modern ghost tours have turned this ground into poltergeist theatre; the walk deliberately refuses that framing and gives the real prisoners the plain respect of your attention.

Legend, charity, and the anatomists' street

Not every stop is grief. At the corner of George the Fourth Bridge and Candlemaker Row stands the small bronze of Greyfriars Bobby, the terrier said to have kept vigil at his master's grave for about fourteen years. The statue was sculpted by William Brodie, erected in eighteen seventy-three, and paid for by Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts. The tour loves the story while noting that scholars, including the writer Jan Bondeson, have questioned it. Nearby rises George Heriot's School, founded on the bequest of a royal goldsmith to King James the Sixth, nicknamed Jinglin' Geordie, who died in sixteen twenty-four leaving just over twenty-three thousand pounds to teach the poor, fatherless children of the city. Its foundation stone was laid in sixteen twenty-eight and it opened in sixteen fifty-nine.

At the Grassmarket's west end stood the West Port, the old town gate. In eighteen twenty-eight, in a lodging house off the street running west from it, William Burke and William Hare killed at least sixteen people, most of them poor, and sold their bodies to the anatomy teacher Robert Knox. Burke was hanged on the Lawnmarket in January eighteen twenty-nine and publicly dissected; Hare testified against him and was let go. The walk names them as victims, in the same register the Grassmarket sets. The route then ends in the Cowgate, a sunken street the sun barely reaches, under the arch of South Bridge, where the new city's roads were carried over the old street rather than through it.

This is a walk best taken slowly, on a weekday, at your own pace, with no group at your shoulder and no schedule pressing you along. The walk starts up the hill at Greyfriars Kirk and comes down to this square: stand where the city did its hanging, and let the rest unfold. For more routes through the city, see our guide to Edinburgh walking tours and the full Edinburgh city page.

Sources

• Tour transcript and fact dossier, "Grassmarket and Greyfriars: The Old Town Below the Rock" (Roamer): primary source for dates, figures, and the sober treatment of the Covenanters and Burke and Hare victims.
• Historic Environment Scotland listings for Greyfriars Kirk and Churchyard, the Grassmarket Covenanters' Memorial and Victoria Terrace: the sixteen thirty-eight signing, the Covenanters' Prison and the market square.
• Scottish Covenanter Memorials Association, Greyfriars prison plaque (2007): the prisoners' numbers, rations and fate.
• Historic UK, "The Story of Greyfriars Bobby": the Victorian vigil legend and its commemoration.
• University of Edinburgh Anatomical Museum, "William Burke": the West Port murders, Robert Knox, and Burke's trial and execution.