The Edinburgh Vaults

by Richard Denning

Any visitor to the city of Edinburgh cannot fail to be aware of the various bridges that are an integral feature of the city center. The city stands on a number of hills with deep valleys in between. Constructing bridges over these valleys massively improved the ease of moving around the city. Any visitor to the Edinburgh Fringe (as I was in the summer of 2014) will spend a great deal of time crossing and recrossing the city via these bridges.

Many of the visitors may be unaware that beneath the South Bridge is a hidden world of passages and catacombs called the South Bridge Vaults.

The South Bridge was built to cross the gorge along which Cowgate runs and to link the city to the University to the south. Building work on the bridge started in 1785. The bridge consisted of 19 stone arches. Towering tenements, shops and workshops were built alongside the bridge, sealing off the archways. As part of the construction some 120 chambers of varying sizes were built. The idea was that these would be store rooms and workshops for the businesses above.

The Cowgate arch - today the only visible archway.

The bridge officially opened for business in 1788 in a manner which seemed to single it out as cursed right from the start. The wife of a local judge was selected to be the first across the bridge, but she died just before the official opening, so she was pushed across in her coffin instead! Many locals refused to cross the bridge after that incident.

As for the vaults being used as warehouses and workshops, this proved a failure. The builders had not waterproofed the vaults and soon water was leaking down the walls. Stocks of goods rotted and became mildewed, and the traders soon abandoned the vaults - within thirty years of their being opened.

Abandoned by the legal owners, the vaults started to attract an underclass of inhabitants. The poorest people who could not afford accommodation elsewhere moved in. So too did Highlanders trying to evade the clearances. Criminals found the dark places ideal lairs or places to find victims or store stolen goods. In 1815 local authorities raided the vaults and found and shut down a distillery.  Burke and Hare, the infamous serial killers who sold corpses to medical schools, are rumoured to have selected their victims in the Edinburgh Vaults.

Between 1835 and 1875 the vaults were gradually cleared and sealed off. There is poor documentation of this operation. What we can say is that the vaults passed out of use and into memory and in time even out of that. Forgotten, they lingered sealed off for over a century.

Students moved in to many of the tenements in the post war period. In 1985 one of the walls of these student flats was accidentally knocked through. Curious, the land lord excavated further and so opened a way into some of the Vaults. So it was that over a hundred years after they were sealed off, the Vaults were rediscovered.

Nowadays the vaults on the south side of Cowgate are home to nights clubs as well as containing remnants of houses that were mostly demolished to create the bridge.There is even a well in one chamber.

The vaults on the north side of the Cowgate arch are used mainly for tours. This summer my family and I went on one of these tours. Apart from historical tours the guides also run ghost tours (mainly at midnight). The links with ghosts have featured on a  number of TV programmes with reported recordings of strange voices such as that of a  priests recanting a prayer.

Some of the chambers do have have obvious links with the occult and witchcraft - like this one which is owned by the local Wiccans and in which weddings and other rituals are performed:

Or this one below in which the circle is rumoured to be haunted. The guide challenged us to walk across the center but warned us that visitors who had reported after effects such as scratches!

None us took up the challenge!

All in all it is a fascinating and atmospheric place. When the lights are off you can almost feel Burke and Hare creeping around. I recommend taking the tour.

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Richard Denning is a historical fiction author whose main period of interest is the Early Anglo-Saxon Era. His Northern Crown series explores the late 6th and early 7th centuries through the eyes of a young Saxon lord.

Explore the darkest years of the dark ages with Cerdic.


www.richarddenning.co.uk

The Darker Side of Georgian Edinburgh

by Lynne Wilson

“Within a few months past we have conversed with gentlemen who have visited the North and South, and the centre of Europe; and they all concur in stating that there is more want and misery in this country than in any other they have seen.”
The Scotsman, 1827, Article on ‘The Prevalence of Crime in Edinburgh’

Crime was, of course, prevalent in all cities in Scotland at this time as the excerpt above points out. Edinburgh, as the capital city and a city which was establishing itself as a centre of learning, culture and respectability, was no doubt more under the spotlight than any other when it came to its failings. The reasons for crime in Edinburgh were the same as they were everywhere, in short, a high level of poverty, disease, death and misery in many parts of the city gave rise to theft, substance abuse and crimes perpetuated through anger.

The population of Edinburgh, as with other cities, had rapidly increased in the 1820s due to the influx of people from rural areas who had found themselves out of work due to the industrialisation which was occurring. Manual labourers who had been used to steady employment suddenly found themselves replaced by machinery on farms and in factories. Many flocked to the cities trying to find work there, but inevitably there were far more people than jobs, and areas within Edinburgh became overcrowded, and with a lack of sanitisation they quickly became dirty and unsanitary. Alcohol and laudanum abuse became widespread as people tried to block out the misery of their situations.

The execution of William Burke

William Burke and William Hare both came to Edinburgh from Ulster during the potato famine hoping, as many people had, to find work. By all accounts they were hard working men who had met when Burke came to live at Hare’s lodging house.

When another tenant of the house, a man named Donald, died owing Hare rent money, the pair took the body to the medical school knowing that they would pay for a fresh corpse to dissect. It was then, when they realised how much money they could earn for a body, that they began to murder to obtain corpses to sell on.

Graveyard Watchtower, New Calton Burying Ground, Edinburgh
© Kim Traynor

The practice of obtaining dead bodies for dissection was a lucrative trade at this time as a growing medical school needed fresh corpses for anatomical dissection. As the only way to legally obtain a corpse for this purpose was to wait until a criminal had been executed, needless to say there simply weren’t enough bodies to meet the medical school’s needs, as unlike in the 18th century where people would be executed for fairly trivial crimes, by the 19th century only those convicted of very serious crimes such as murder were being executed. 

As the medical school would pay very well for fresh corpses in good condition, a great many criminals considered that stealing bodies from graveyards was a risk worth taking, particularly as this crime was not viewed by the courts as serious and only attracted a short spell of imprisonment or a fine. This being the case, many relatives of those recently deceased would take turns to watch over the grave until such time as the corpse would be old enough to be of no use for anatomy. Men were also often employed to watch over the churchyards to prevent the activity of grave robbing.

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By Lynne Wilson, author of the historical non-fiction ebooks 'A Year in
Victorian Edinburgh' and 'Crime & Punishment in Victorian Edinburgh'; and the paperbacks, 'Murder & Crime in Stirling' and ‘A Grim Almanac of Glasgow’.
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My Website, Scotland’s History Uncovered