Evendays

This is another way families kept the dead in the ground in Edinburgh during those difficult days in the 1800’s. Imagine having the iron casket within the tomb and the iron fence (mortsafes) around the tomb. Makes me feel comfy.

Some tourism pushes the haunted, the dark and the scary stories of the burgh’s past with visits to the underground city where the poorest of the poor lived and died. One guide told us that during a time of plague the underground entrances were walled up and those below were left to die. “And some say” (please imagine the Scottish accent) “their spirits still infest those deep, dark dwellings.”

In this cemetery near the Greyfriar church, 1200 “Covenanters” (who supported a form of Presbyterianism) were imprisoned in 1679 for refusing to give in to the political (and religious) demands of the King Charles. There they spent the winter with little food and only the tombstones for protection.

The nearby area was where JK Rowling spent her time dreaming of Harry Potter and Hogwarts when she hardly had a shilling to her name. I’m still digging through her seventh tome, yet haven’t come to the part where Dumbledore comes out of the closet.

Don’t tell me how it ends…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Death, Tourism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.