EDINBURGH GRAVEYARDS

Graveyards are a fascinating gateway into the extraordinarily rich lives of the men and women who have found themselves, by accident or design, in the capital city of Scotland.

There are those such as the five American Civil War veterans (Old Calton) who died overseas and whose bodies were brought back to their native land. There are the unfortunate passers‑through suddenly struck by death – such as the scientist Julius von Yellin from Munich (Old Calton) who was in Edinburgh only to give a lecture. There are those who, like the poet William McGonagall (Greyfriars), were born and died in the city. And then there are the publicly executed criminals (Buccleuch) and the Royal babies (Holyrood) many of whom scarcely saw the light of day.

A word of caution to the visitor — some of Edinburgh’s graveyards present formidable hazards such 15 feet high Giant Hogweed or the physical menace posed by all too real human spectres lurking in the ruins of long-forgotten graves. For safety’s sake, don’t walk alone!

Entering one of the city’s oldest graveyards — Greyfriars Kirk — can sometimes be intimidating to the faint-hearted. The Kirk is a giant barn shooting into the sky. On the east wall, facing you, the bulging rib‑cage of a skeleton prances, swinging a scythe and holding the Book of Destiny (you can almost hear the skull cackling). Sharp surgical knives and scissors hang on each side, tied with bows. Ignore the quivering skeleton if you can. Turn immediately to your left past the brown and gold notice board which glistens with the names of the famous dead. If you listen carefully you can almost hear a low murmur of many voices from beneath your feet. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like many other graveyards, Greyfriars was at the mercy of the ‘resurrectionists’, desperate to supply newly-buried bodies to surgeons for medical research and training. They could remove a body from its grave under the cover of darkness in less than an hour.

And, of course, there is ample evidence of tragedy in the burials at the GrangeCemetery, for example: Mrs Elizabeth Chantrelle, a young mother cruelly poisoned by her French schoolteacher husband, Eugène in 1878. At the Grange also is the grave of gunsmith Thomas Leslie who went to inspect the pistol with which the well-known geologist and writer Hugh Miller (1802-56) had committed suicide the day before in Portobello while tormented by brain disease. The revolver, rusted from lying overnight in Miller’s bath, was taken to the gunsmith who had supplied it in order to discover exactly how many bullets had been fired. It was lunchtime when the gun was brought into the shop which had originally sold it to Hugh Miller. It was handed over to the foreman, Thomas Leslie, with the words ‘Mind, it is loaded’. Leslie examined the rusty safety‑catch. He held it up to his eye. He lifted the hammer to count the bullets. At that instant the pistol went off through his eye, blowing his brains out. Thomas Leslie, who had eight children and had worked with guns for 25 years, was buried in the GrangeCemetery a little earlier on the very same day as Hugh Miller.

RosebankCemetery, off Pilrig Street, also holds the evidence of terrible suffering and heroism, which explains why cemeteries exist — not only for reasons of public hygiene but as places of remembrance of pain, loss and love beyond the grave.

On 22 May 1915 the enthusiastic volunteers of the Royal Scots, 7th Leith Battalion (Territorials) set out from Larbert to go to Liverpool for the Dardanelles and Gallipoli. There were five hundred men of the regiment on board as the train, travelling at fifty miles an hour, neared Quintinshill signal box just outside Gretna.

From the signal box a 120 ton local train had been transferred onto the up line and a goods train waited in a siding parallel to the main line.

Just after 6.30 am the troop carrier with 16 officers and 470 men of the Royal Scots exploded head‑first into the local train. The first three coaches of the troop train, each with eight men to a compartment, fragmented instantly. Three minutes later the Euston to Glasgow express roared into the wreckage, bulldozing the troop train over the goods train close by.

In Leith’s Dalmeny Street drill hall row upon row of coffins were laid out. The dead were buried, some privately, some at the public funeral. One hundred coffins were buried in a mass grave and a further nineteen at the public ceremony, at what is now a place of public pilgrimage.

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