You could say that Grassmarket is just a wonderful old street. But, really, it’s a wee bit more than that.

Grassmarket is one of the original streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town. First mentioned in a document from 1366, it became a market in 1477 and – at least on a Saturday – it’s still a market today. It has an incredible history and today it’s one of the liveliest places to visit in Edinburgh.

Grassmarket

The street called Grassmarket lies in the valley on the south side of the Royal Mile and Edinburgh Castle (in my opinion, it offers quite the best view of the castle anywhere in Edinburgh).  

It has four entrance / exit streets that provide access. At the west end, enter from West Port, the old western gate in the city wall, and King Stables Road, originally the location of the actual king’s horse stables.

At the east end, entrance is from the Cowgate, the wonderful old street that’s second in age only to the Royal Mile itself, and the West Bow, the steep hill full of eclectic shops and buildings that links up to the top of the Royal Mile.

As well as a place of markets, Grassmarket was also a place of killing – public executions were held there until 1784

The valley in which the Grassmarket sits, matches the valley on the north side of the Royal Mile, now better known as Princes Street Gardens. It is these valleys, and the high ridge of the Royal Mile in the middle, shaped by the great ice sheets of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, that dictated the early street layout of Edinburgh leading to the creation of the wonderful Old Town.

The first historical reference to Grassmarket is in 1366 in The Register of the Great Seal of Scotland where it’s called ‘Newbygging under the Castle’ (bygging is a Scots word for buildings). 

In 1477 when the king, James III granted Edinburgh charters for various markets and guilds’, Newbygging under the Castle’ became a marketplace for cattle and became known as the Grassmarket by around 1635.

The market ran for 434 years, right up until 1911 when the cattle market moved to Lauriston Place.

The street is called Grassmarket not (as you might think) because grass was sold there but because of the grass-eating animals that were sold in the markets. Cattle and sheep mostly but horses were also bought and sold there.

In addition to livestock, other commodities were traded in Grassmarket and the West Bow that rises at the east end of the Grassmarket. Over the centuries, both were incredibly busy places for trading.

It needs to be borne in mind that in olden times there were no shops as we think of them today. Trading, buying and selling were all carried out in the streets and these central parts of the Old Town were the place to trade.

So if you wanted to buy or sell livestock, horses, corn, salt you’d go to Grassmarket and if you wanted other commodities you’d head up the West Bow to buy things like iron, pitch, tar, oil, hemp, flax, linseed, painters’ colours, dyers and drugs (medicines).

We get a lot of that information about what was sold there from the author, Daniel Defoe (yes, the Robinson Crusoe author), who resided in Edinburgh in the early years of the 18th century reported of the markets and market traders in ‘the Bow’, as they bought goods up from their warehouses in Leith (Edinburgh’s port).

Hangings In The Grassmarket

As well as a place of markets, the Grassmarket was also a place of hangings. Public hangings continued in the Grassmarket until 1784 – not that public hangings ended then. After 1784 they moved to the Royal Mile.

The massive sandstone block that held the ‘gallows tree’ remained in situ until 1823, well after public hangings had ended there. Although the stone’s now gone, its place is now occupied by the Covenanters Memorial, where a shadow of the gallows is described in the stone paving around the Memorial.

As well as the hanging of the Covenanters, of which more later, there is another hanging at the Grassmarket that entered folklore and remembrance – the execution of Margaret (Maggie) Dickson in 1724.

Maggie Dickson

Maggie, a fish ‘hawker’ (seller) , was tried and convicted of murder in 1724 after she concealed her pregnancy. The child was born premature and subsequently died, which in Scotland at the time was a capital offence.

She was hanged in the Grassmarket but as her friends took her coffin on a cart to the local graveyard, they heard a knocking on the lid. Puzzled, they stopped and opened the coffin, and found Maggie still alive!

They took her out of the coffin and revived her, whereupon she lived for another 40 years, forever known as ‘Half-hangit Maggie’.

The Covenanters Memorial

In 1637, King Charles I (the one that got his head chopped off) had the bright idea of imposing the Book of Common Prayer, used in the Angclian church in England, into the protestant churches in Scotland. 

Scotland, the last country in Europe to convert from Catholicism to Protestantism, objected strongly and, as was so often with religious conflicts, violently.

It was a complex conflict and ran for some 50 years, with the last 10 years or so of the conflict called ‘The Killing Times’ when thousands died in battle, torture, and executions.

The Covenanters Memorial in Grassmarket commemorates the executions by hanging of over 100 convenanters. Their names are inscribed on the granite wall by the Memorial.

Burke & Hare: Serial Killers

By the 19th century, the Grassmarket was a rather gloomy place, with many poor living and working there – an ideal place if you needed bodies. And the place that did indeed need bodies was the Edinburgh University Medical School.

The Medical School was in a bind. Famous around the world for its teaching of medicine, it found it was short of dead bodies for its anatomy classes for dissection and so put out the word that anybody bringing a body to the school would be paid up to £10, no questions asked.

This gave rise to the criminal underground digging up freshly buried bodies from the two graveyards in Edinburgh and hawking them at Medical School. Often called Bodysnatchers or ‘Resurrection Men’, they would follow funeral processions, wait until cover of darkness, dig up the body and deliver it to the Medical School for cash.

William Burke and William Hare were two Irish immigrants, who lived just off the Grassmarket at the West Port which doubled as a lodging house in which an old soldier rented a room. One day, the pair found the old man dead and, wondering what to do with the body, hit on the idea of taking it to the Medical School.

So they hauled the old soldier’s body up to the school and were paid £7 10s (£7.50) for the old soldier’s body, the equivalent of around £850 at today’s value, and the pair saw an easy way to make money.

They would mark a victim and take him (or her – they killed women as well) to the pubs in the Grassmarket and get them drunk. Then they’d take the victim back to their lodging house where they would suffocate them in such a way that it left no trace and made it look the victim had died of natural causes.

In all, Burke & Hare killed 13 people before they were discovered and arrested. William Hare then turned King’s Evidence and told all to the police in return for his freedom, which he got. He disappeared from view and it’s thought he returned to Ireland.

William Burke, on the other hand, wasn’t quite so lucky. He was convicted of two murders and hanged in the Royal Mile in 1829. 

Of course the murders and the involvement of the Medical School was a huge scandal and Burke’s execution attracted a  huge crowd of 25,000 people to watch him hang. People living around the scaffold made money by renting our their windows to people wanting a good view of the hanging.

Afterwards the law was changed to make it easier for anatomy schools to obtain cadavers for their research and teaching. But it was a terrible series of horrific events that drove the change.

Grassmarket Today

Since the dreadful days of the Killing Times and Burke & Hare, the Grassmarket has been transformed into a wonderful place for eating, drinking, exploring and sightseeing.

Some of the pubs are some of the oldest pubs in Edinburgh. The basement of The White Hart Inn dates back to the 16th century, while the pub itself has seen some famous guests over its long years of standing in the Grassmarket.

The name, White Hart Inn, remembers King David I’s founding of Holyrood Abbey in 1128 where he fought off a stag with a cross that had descended from the clouds above his head. Another name for a stag is a hart.

Robert Burns stayed in the White Hart Inn on his last visit to Edinburgh in 1791, where he supposedly wrote Ae Fond Kiss, as he and his lover, Nancy Craig, departed each other for the last time.

The Wordsworths, Dorothy and William, stayed at the White Hart Inn when the visited Edinburgh, Dorothy reporting that the White Hart Inn was ‘pleasingly inexpensive’.

Other pubs are Maggie Dickson’s, which of course remembers Maggie Dickson, and the Smallest Pub in Scotland. Check it out and see if you agree.

There are lots of restaurants serving many different cuisines and because of the width of the Grassmarket, many have table outside where you can enjoy eating al fresco (if it’s warm enough or isn’t raining!).

Walk east along Grassmarket to the wellhead at the junction of West Bow and take a left there to stroll up the eclectic street. 

The wellhead, by the way, is one of only a few left  (the others are in the Royal Mile) of the old wells that brought running water to the streets, piped in through wooden pipes from the Pentland Hills some twelve miles away.

If you can get to the Grassmarket on a Saturday, you’ll be able to stroll around the little market that sets up shop every week. And if you walk from the Grassmarket to Castle Terrace (walk west to King’s Stables Road then cut up through the car park steps) and you’ll reach the wonderful Saturday Farmers’ Market where you’ll be able to taste and buy some of the finest produce available in Edinburgh.

Getting To Grassmarket, Edinburgh

The Grassmarket lies squarely in the old town of Edinburgh, so if you’re sightseeing there, it’s a short walk to Grassmarket. At the top of the Royal Mile at Lawnmarket, walk a short way south along George IV Bridge then turn right down Victoria Street, which turns into West Bow which in turn flows into the west end of Grassmarket.

By bus to Grassmarket

Bus number 2 will take you directly to Grassmarket

By car to Grassmarket

Park at the Castle Terrace multi-storey car park. After parking, walk down the stairs to King’s Stables Road and walk east to Grassmarket. There is also limited on-street parking in the Grassmarket itself for £3 – £4 hour (free on Sundays)

By bike to Grassmarket

By bike you can enter Grassmarket from any of it’s three entrances: West Port, King’s Stables Road and Cowgate (the West Bow is one-way only).