Greyfriars Kirkyard

The National Covenant was signed in a graveyard. Not in the kirk beside it — in the yard, on 28 February 1638, because the ground outside was a place of free legal public assembly and the building was not. Later pictures of the scene show men leaning on flat table stones to write; there were no such stones in the kirkyard at the time, central gravestones being under a ban, so the artists supplied furniture the occasion did not have.

Greyfriars Kirkyard surrounds Greyfriars Kirk at the southern edge of Edinburgh’s Old Town, next to George Heriot’s School. It takes its name from the Franciscan friary that stood here — grey habits, grey friars — which was dissolved in 1560. Two years later, in August 1562, royal sanction was granted to lay out a burial ground on the site to replace the one at St Giles’ Cathedral; the burgh council had resolved on the change on 23 April 1561, and St Giles’ ground fell out of use around 1600. Burials have been taking place here ever since, and a long list of notable Edinburgh residents lies in the ground.

The Covenanting story did not end with the signing. After the militant Covenanters were beaten at Bothwell Bridge on 22 June 1679, some 1,200 prisoners were brought to Edinburgh, more than the prison or the castle could take. A field south of the kirkyard was pressed into service for about 400 of them: enclosed by the Flodden Wall on two sides, by the high wall of George Heriot’s School on the west, and on the fourth side by a picket fence that could be watched from the churchyard. The name Covenanters’ Prison stayed with the ground long after the prisoners left. Most of it was built over by the city Bedlam around 1690, and a strip between the Bedlam and the school was taken into the burial ground from about 1700 — which is why that section is dominated by enclosed vaults. The vaults look like cells and are often described as such. They were built after the prisoners had gone.

That corner was open to view until around 1990, when the City of Edinburgh Council locked it against persistent vandalism and use by drug users. It can still be entered by day by arrangement with the guides at Greyfriars Kirk, and at night on a City of the Dead tour, which takes visitors to the Black Mausoleum.

The kirkyard’s other fame is smaller and warmer. Greyfriars Bobby, the dog said to have kept watch over his master’s grave, has a headstone at the entrance, put up by the Dog Aid Society in 1981, marking his reputed burial place — though no part of the kirkyard is unconsecrated ground, so it is also held that he was buried under a tree outside the gates. His statue stands opposite the gate at the junction of George IV Bridge and Candlemaker Row. The grave of John Gray, the Pentland Hills shepherd known as Auld Jock, where the dog is said to have slept for fourteen years, lies on the eastern path some thirty metres north of the entrance. The stone there is modern; the grave was originally unmarked.

In the 1840s the yard served a quite different purpose. David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, working in the first years of photography, used it as a setting for portraits and staged tableaux, among them The Artist and The Gravedigger — the stones and the light doing work that a studio could not.

The kirkyard and its monuments are protected as a category A listed building. The ground is operated by the City of Edinburgh Council in liaison with a charitable trust, linked to but separate from the church.