Qualla: Greyfriars Kirkyard

Greyfriars Kirkyard: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Allan, Public domain. The Skye terrier waited fourteen years. His master, a Pentland Hills shepherd called Auld Jock, was buried in the eastern path of Greyfriars Kirkyard sometime in 1858. The dog, named Bobby, refused to leave the grave. People fed him. He slept beside it through Edinburgh winters and the long summer light. When he finally died in 1872 the city had grown around him - a little terrier had become part of its idea of itself. The graveyard he kept watch in had other stories too. Twelve hundred Covenanter prisoners, the signing of a Covenant that started a war, mortsafes against body snatchers, a sealed tomb with footballers playing in it. Bobby's grief just happened to be the one Edinburgh chose to remember most.

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Image: William Allan | Public domain

Greyfriars Kirkyard: Where the Friars Gave Way

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Franciscan friary that gave Greyfriars its name was dissolved in 1560 during the Scottish Reformation. By 1562 Mary, Queen of Scots had granted its grounds to Edinburgh's town council for use as a burial ground - St Giles' kirkyard was full and unhealthy and could not take an...

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Image: Kim Traynor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Greyfriars Kirkyard: The Signing in the Yard

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kim traynor, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 28 February 1638, the National Covenant was read inside Greyfriars Kirk and then taken outside to be signed. The kirkyard provided the open ground that the kirk's interior could not: hundreds of signatories needing space, witnesses, daylight. The depictions of the moment that ...

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Image: kim traynor | CC BY-SA 2.0

Greyfriars Kirkyard: The Covenanters' Prison

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sourav Niyogi, (WT-en) P.K.Niyogi at English Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. After the defeat of the Covenanters at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge on 22 June 1679, some 1,200 prisoners were marched to Edinburgh. The prison and the castle could not hold them all. About 400 of them were detained in a field just south of the kirkyard, enclosed on two sides by...

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Image: Sourav Niyogi, (WT-en) P.K.Niyogi at English Wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Greyfriars Kirkyard: Bloody MacKenzie

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Oldenbuck, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh was the Lord Advocate who prosecuted Covenanters during the Killing Time. The Italianate domed tomb he was buried in - designed by James Smith and modelled on Bramante's Tempietto di San Pietro in Rome - sits within the very Covenanters' Prison w...

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Image: Jonathan Oldenbuck | CC BY-SA 3.0

Greyfriars Kirkyard: Bobby

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kim traynor, CC BY-SA 2.0. The graveyard's most famous resident is not a human. Greyfriars Bobby was a Skye terrier said to have spent fourteen years guarding the grave of his owner, a man variously identified as a nightwatchman or a shepherd called John Gray, known locally as Auld Jock. The story may have...

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Image: kim traynor | CC BY-SA 2.0

Greyfriars Kirkyard: Mortsafes and Mural Monuments

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Supergolden, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh Medical College's demand for cadavers had made body snatching a serious local industry. Greyfriars filled with iron cages - mortsafes - leased over fresh graves to keep them protected long enough for the body to decompose past usefulness...

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Image: Supergolden | CC BY-SA 3.0