Latest / UK Travel Planning / Unearthing the History of Edinburgh's Greyfriars Kirkyard with Charlotte Golledge

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Unearthing the History of Edinburgh's Greyfriars Kirkyard with Charlotte Golledge · UK Travel Planning

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the UK Travel Planning Podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Your host is the founder of the UK Travel Planning website, tracey Collins.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: In this podcast, tracey shares destination guides, travel tips and itinerary ideas, as well as interviews with a variety of guests who share their knowledge and experience of UK travel to help you plan your perfect UK vacation.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: Join us as we explore the UK from cosmopolitan cities to quaint villages, from historic castles to beautiful islands, and from the picturesque countryside to seaside towns.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: Hi and welcome to episode 88 of the UK Travel Planning Podcast.
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: I'm really excited again this week because I have got Charlotte Gollage back.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: Charlotte is from Edinburgh Black Cab Tour so I spoke to her last week.
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: So if you didn't hear that episode, do go back and listen to Charlotte talk all about the company and the tours they do.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: But I'm inviting Charlotte about this week because Charlotte has a particular specialism and a particular interest which when I was chatting to in preparation for the last podcast, I kind of went I want to talk more about this.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: So I'm going to let Charlotte introduce herself and tell her what that is, but I'm just going to say two words and those two words are grey fryer's kirkyard.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: So, charlotte, would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about this particular area of specialism that you have?
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: Okay, so obviously, yes, I'm Charlotte Gollage.
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: I'm one of the four main guides with Edinburgh Black Cab tours, along with Steve, stephen and Kevin.
• 1:34
  Speaker 3: But the other thing that I am is I am known as the death historian and that is because I specialised in death history, mainly 18th century funeral practices, for my dissertation.
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: So that came off the back of me, starting working grey fryer's and working around grey fryer's for the last 19 years.
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: So I've always had a deep interest in graveyards.
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: The symbology on Scottish Presbytery and Graves is absolutely phenomenal.
• 2:07
  Speaker 3: You know you'll go in and you'll see the skull and crossbones and no, it's not pirates and no, it's not plague victims, which is often what people say they are not.
• 2:16
  Speaker 3: And you know, growing up with something like that, it's fascinating.
• 2:22
  Speaker 3: I've always had an overactive imagination, so looking at these gravestones when you can't even see the names anymore but you can see all the imagery going on is amazing.
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: So I first of all started working in an information centre.
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: It was basically the information centre that was run by City of the Dead tours, who do tours of grey fryer's.
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: At one time they were the only company that went in there, but now there's a multitude of companies who go in.
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: They all have their different specialities.
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: But I started documenting the gravestones because I noticed like some of them were having, they were degrading basically, and I thought it would be such a shame.
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: I mean they've been documented before, but I wanted to do it too.
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: I mean I was sketching them, I was taking photographs of them and it was just became like a real passion of mine.
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: We skipped forward through the years and obviously I did my history degree, then I went and did my master's degree and when I was deciding on my dissertation I was kind of speaking about it and I was like, well, I could do work houses because that's quite interesting.
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: Or I could do some aspect of grey fryer's because I know so much about it.
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: And pretty much my my tutor at the time was like don't do work houses.
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: She's like I see work houses all the time.
• 3:37
  Speaker 3: So I was like, right, I'm going to do grey fryer's.
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: And I basically went to the National Records of Scotland and I went looking through anything that was connected to grey fryer's, because the great thing is, in Scotland all records are actually.
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: You know they, you can, anybody in the public can look up these records.
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: You know, right back from 400 years ago to, like last week, anyone who gets married or dies.
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: You know these records are our public records so anybody can look at them.
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: So I went through a lot of these, not so much the the certificates, it was actually some family papers of this gentleman called Thomas Smith and it was basically his burial record.
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: You know, of all the different things that had to be paid for to have a funeral and I found it absolutely fascinating.
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: You know it was everything from gloves that people had to have and what food there was going to be, and then it came down to the two watchmen who were going to be watching the grave and of course that comes into the whole body snatching side of things.
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: So from this one document, all of a sudden this, this big project well, project, it was my dissertation, but it's gone further than that now.
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: You know it's like I spend a lot of time in various graveyards.
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: Now I write about them.
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: I wrote about grey fryer's first.
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: I mean it is actually grey fryer's Kirkyard but my publisher, being ambly publishing, thought that Kirkyards might limit people who would read it.
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: So for everyone in Scotland who are like it's a cart yard yes, I know, it's a cart yard.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: I've actually got the book in front of me because I read it today.
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: I find it absolutely fascinating place to visit.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: But you have such an in-depth knowledge and I was reading through the book today and I read the bit about Thomas and about his funeral, which is really interesting, and then the bit about the grave snatchers which I've got a history degree and I knew a little bit about.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: But, wow, absolutely fascinating.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: So do you know about the history of when Grey Friars began and kind of what the history was over time and when was the last burial there?
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: I do know quite a lot of these questions.
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: So basically it was the Grey Friars.
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: That's why it got called Grey Friars.
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: It was the Franciscan monks and they would wear the grey habits.
• 5:59
  Speaker 3: So they were given the lands there.
• 6:02
  Speaker 3: It was on the outskirts of the city.
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: They were very well known for healing the sick and doing a lot for the community.
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: And then obviously the Reformation happens.
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: The buildings got sacked, the monks got sort of chased off, but they kept the name Grey Friars for the area because they weren't hated by anybody, it's just they were no longer welcome there.
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: So when Mary Queen of Scots gifted the land to the people of Edinburgh because round St Giles that was at one time this gigantic graveyard that everybody was being buried in from Edinburgh and it was becoming so overpopulated.
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: So when you're in Edinburgh walking down the Royal Mile and you walk around the back of St Giles, you're literally walking on what was once the main burial ground for the city and it was realised they needed another burial ground.
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: So they used Grey Friars.
• 6:55
  Speaker 3: It was gifted to the city by the Queen.
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: She gave it to them.
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: She also gave one to the people of Dundee, which again was another Grey Friars, although that's known as the Hough in Dundee.
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: So that was gifted as well, and it was for the burial of the dead.
• 7:13
  Speaker 3: Now the population of Edinburgh started to expand and so at Grey Friars it started off as a parish burial ground, which is different from a cemetery.
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: It's a parish burial ground.
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: It's connected to a church.
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: But then they realised they needed a congregation.
• 7:27
  Speaker 3: There was a need for a congregation, so that's when the church came along.
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: The church was then built after the burial ground, so usually you'll have a church first and the burial ground will appear around it.
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: But this was done the opposite way around.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's fascinating.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: I didn't know that.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: So I know because I was at St Giles and did that too and I know they were kind of saying that at the point when there was lots of rains that actually bodies were kind of going down the hill Been washed down because there were so many.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: So they decided then to start burying people in Grey Friars.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: So I know, when you go in Grey Friars today there's kind of a lot of gravestones and mausoleums and the different ways of kind of marking the burials.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: But I know, not everybody was buried that way, though.
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: They just just say they just started burying people and not marking them where they were put.
• 8:16
  Speaker 3: Well, the thing is, if you were poor you wouldn't have a gravestone.
• 8:19
  Speaker 3: So after the Reformation had happened it was no longer considered appropriate to bury people within the churches.
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: That was seen as being very Catholic.
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: So they wanted to get people out into the graveyards.
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: So a lot of the well to do would take the areas around the walls so they could have these big mural monuments put up that looked quite similar to the sort of monuments they would have inside the churches.
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: That's why when you go to Grey Friars, like all the walls are, you know, mostly covered in these beautiful big monuments.
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: But if you look in the central areas there's very few gravestones and that's because a lot of the poor people were being buried in those areas, couldn't afford a headstone.
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: And when you see the internment records, I mean some people will be like, let's just say, george MacDonald and he's buried five paces south of the tree.
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: Now the tree is gone.
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: We do not know where the tree is.
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: There's been various trees, but that's how the internment records were done and also, at the time, people in these areas.
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: They would have known each other.
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: So it wasn't like you had to know a gravestone to know where somebody was, you just knew where they were and if you had any more family you'd probably want them put there.
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: But if you were poor you wouldn't really have much choice in the matter.
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: You had to rely on your parish to bury you.
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: And I mean at one time in Scotland if you were very poor you didn't even have to have a coffin, you had to be wrapped.
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: But you didn't need a coffin and some graveyards in Scotland they formed societies where they actually would buy a communal coffin so you'd be carried along the streets in your coffin, get to the gravesite and then basically a trap door would open, the body would drop inside.
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: So it was all been very, very dignified until you get to the last part.
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: But in Scotland the actual burial part was not part of the ceremony.
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: The ceremony was when you died.
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: People would come to the house.
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: It was called a lie wake and that's why you're lying there.
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: The wake is happening all the time.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: So when you see like there's bottles of whiskey, there's this cake and everything like that because if you don't have enough to give your visitors, then it was seen that you were not honoring your dead properly.
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: The day of the funeral would come round, so everybody would come in to say their goodbyes and at that point the women would no longer be involved in it.
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: They were seen as being too emotional, so they never.
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: They wouldn't go along the procession usually, and the procession was usually done.
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: You'd have the mutes at the front and if you've ever watched all of our twists obviously all of our gets sent out to the undertakers and you see him and he's got like the, the hat and the big ribbon all coming down.
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: You'd have the batten men who would walk at the sides of the battens.
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: They didn't go around hitting anybody, but you know that was to get clear people out the way.
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: So the walking funeral would come through.
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: You might have the man with the bell at the front, with the deed bell, and he would just be ringing it to basically let people know that there's a funeral coming through.
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: And if you were from the great and the good, I mean these walking funerals could stretch on for a good couple of miles, you know, as people were joining them, as they were going along, and then once you got to the gravesite, it was kind of that's it.
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: You know you wouldn't even necessarily have a minister there.
• 11:30
  Speaker 3: You know it was like that.
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: That was the end of it.
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: You just got there, got buried and well, that was it.
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: For most people, obviously, that's the point that the body snatchers would come along and be like we have a nice fresh body here.
• 11:43
  Speaker 3: So quite often you would see the landed and the rich.
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: They would pay for watchmen to come and basically watch the grave.
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: Now, the problem with these watchmen is they're not getting paid very much.
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: Yet if they have a fresh body that they can take to the anatomy schools, they can get about £8, 9, 10 pounds, which is basically almost like a year's salary for them.
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: So what's even better is you're getting paid to watch a grave that you've dug up, you've moved the body and then you just sat there like watching it and you already know the body's gone.
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: Because at the time in Edinburgh, if you read the newspapers it's like it wasn't happening.
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: It wasn't happening, nobody talked about it.
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: It wasn't in the newspapers.
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: But if you read things like the Liverpool Echo or you read some of the London Illustrated News, everything like that, and they're talking about these barrels of brine being found in Leith where they've been shipped up from London, they've been shipped up from Liverpool with bodies in them.
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: In London there was the Ben Crouch gang and they went around the cemeteries of London and they were digging up bodies and actually sending them up to Edinburgh, because the demand was so high and if you were a very poor student you just needed a body, so it didn't matter if it was like a month or so old, you still needed it.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: I read they had to have three bodies while they studied to be a doctor and that was kind of the early 19th century, late 18th century.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: I mean this comes in from, you know, the 18th century.
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: You know this goes right back.
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: This book I've got here is the Royal College of Surgeons 50-05 to 1905.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: And that's like all the surgeons and all these surgeons would have needed bodies at one time.
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: And in Scotland, basically the only body you could legally use is if someone had been convicted of usually murder and they were sentenced to death, but part of their punishment would then be dissection.
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: Now the Presbyterian belief was your body needed to stay intact.
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: So when you die I mean, obviously the Catholic faith has one view, the Episcopalian faith has another view and both those views do not need the body.
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: The body is merely your vessel.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: But the Presbyterians of that time believed that when you died, your soul was instantly released and went up to heaven.
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: So that's when you see, like the little faces with the wings on them.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: That is actually the representation of the soul.
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: The soul is completely innocent of your free will.
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: That's your body, that's you that has the free will and it's you that can sin.
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: So your soul goes straight off to heaven.
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: It's fine up there.
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: Then, when the day of judgment comes along, the angels of the resurrection will blow their trumpets and your body.
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: If you've been good and it's deemed that you can go up, your body will rise out of the ground, go up to heaven and you'll live this eternal life of happiness and joy because you've had such a harsh life on earth and you've been very good and you've had no fun and you've just praised God and worked.
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: So that's basically going to be your prize when you get up there.
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: But if you have a body that's been tampered with and it's been dissected, there's no body to go up there to join it.
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: So while it wasn't a crime to have a body dig up a body, morally it was very wrong and societies really weren't happy about it.
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: And you go through all these different records and you actually see people saying oh, we were there to make sure the students stayed away, we were guarding the grave for a certain amount of time, and this is all in people's private letters that are in the National Records for Scotland.
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: But you look at the newspapers there's nothing.
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: There's nothing mentioning this at all.
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: And in fact you can actually read some of the advertisements by the anatomy schools where they're bragging about having daily autopsies so people could go along and watch the anatomy classes, and one of them being Dr Robert Knox.
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: Now, the difference with Dr Robert Knox was he was having these classes that people could attend in the summer.
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: Now, usually you wouldn't want bodies that smell a decay.
• 15:50
  Speaker 3: Well, he must have been getting fresh bodies from someone.
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: And in comes Birkin Hair.
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: So Birkin Hair did not dig up bodies.
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: They were not grave.
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: You know, snap, they were technically body snatchers because they were snatching bodies that were still living and they killed them.
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: They weren't.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: They weren't stealing from the grave, they weren't digging anybody up.
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: So you know, often they weren't resurrectionists, and that's the term usually used for the people that resurrect the body out of the ground.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: They're the resurrectionists.
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: They were not resurrectionists Technically.
• 16:24
  Speaker 3: They could be body snatchers.
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: And it wasn't in the papers the fact that people were, if they had the money, were building bars around where they were being buried or having guards on.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: They kind of knew that that was gonna be a risk when they died, didn't they?
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: So it was kind of well known, even though they weren't kind of publicizing it.
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: It was very well known.
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: I mean, there's one surgeon who's buried in gray friars and you see his enclosure and he's got big gates on the front of his enclosure and he's got big bars on the top and he died in the 1700s.
• 16:54
  Speaker 3: And if a surgeon is doing that sort of thing to his grave, he knows what's going on, and so these are known as morphsafes, so it's basically to protect the dead, so they can basically put your fry and you cannot no longer be used by the anatomy schools.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: And when you get out of Edinburgh I mean, it wasn't just Edinburgh the bodies were getting taken from everywhere.
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: If you come over to Fife, obviously it's just like a little boat.
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: Well, it's quite a big boat ride, but if you're rowing across the force with these bodies, we have older site that has a mort house which if you were part of the society and paid into it when you died, your body was put in there.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: It was guarded in there until the point where your body would no longer be useful.
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: Then it was buried.
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: Other parishes would have mort stones, so they would use these massive stones to put over the grave.
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: So again, they think it would be safe.
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: However, body snatches or resurrectionists.
• 17:52
  Speaker 3: They didn't like dig a nice hole to open up a whole coffin worth.
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: They would usually dig right down at the head, they would get rope around it and they would pull the body out from one end.
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: A few years ago I was actually involved with the young archeologists in Dumfarmland and a couple of the graves because they were actually excavating down into the grave areas because they were finding all sorts of artifacts that came along.
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: People use it as a dump and a couple of the graves that we came across had big stone slabs that kind of went near the head end and near the foot end but not in the middle, because obviously if you went down the middle you can't pull the body out from the middle.
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: It has to come from one end or the other.
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: So people were doing that.
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: People would also put big branches inside the graves so it's harder to get through the branches to get to the bodies.
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: There was so many ways that people were trying to do these things, and especially poor people, because they couldn't afford to do these things.
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: I mean, there were a lot of watch houses were put in so people could sit in these watch houses and unfortunately a lot of these things came into play very, very close to the end of the body snatching, because after Burke and Hare had done their thing, and down in London there was a case known as the Italian boy.
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: This was all happening at about the same time the 1832 Anatomy Act came in and basically it made a lot more bodies available.
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: It also made it illegal for you to tamper with a grave.
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: So all these things came into play.
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: But in Grave Fries, you actually see, there's a couple of graves that still have well.
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: One in particular has a mort safe and the date on it is well after 1832.
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: So obviously people were still worried about these sort of things happening.
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: And again it's you know, it's your loved ones.
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: But it's not just the fact that it's your loved ones, it's the fact you might never get to see them on the day of judgment, when you're up in heaven and they're not there because somebody's chopped you up.
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: But on the other side of things, edinburgh was such a leading place for medical studies and we probably wouldn't have been as advanced as fast as we were in Scotland without these people.
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: So while on one side of it, it's a very gruesome and hard thing to get your head around.
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: On the other side of it is it made Edinburgh this leading establishment for medical studies.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: So it's a fact of the kind of history of Grave Fries that happened and the history of Edinburgh, and I don't think you can't talk about Greyfriars without talking about the reality of what it was like in those times as well.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: But there's a couple of other things with Greyfriars that I have to mention, and obviously one is the Harry Potter connection, and you can kind of see why JK Rowling would have got the inspiration and some of the names potentially.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: I don't know if she's actually said that she's got the names from there or if that's just a kind of More recently she has been claiming that she didn't get the names from there.
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: I think last year on Twitter, she decided to have a moment where she said that no, she didn't get the names from there.
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: I mean, she did explain away some of the names Scrimmager is actually part of Thomas Smith's family and that's Sarah LaDundee's family.
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: The scrimmagers and the Wedderbots Probably good to say.
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: She'd probably got McGonagall, if I'm honest, because McGonagall is a Dundee name.
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: Well, it came from Ireland really, but there's still the McGonagall family from William McGonagall, who is the poet, and obviously Professor McGonagall is there.
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: She's so far removed from William McGonagall the poet.
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: It's unbelievable.
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: And I mean some people do say about Thomas Riddle, but there's actually an enclosure quite close to the front gate of Greyfriars and it's the Riddle family that are there.
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: So I'm a little bit dubious that she travelled all the way through the graveyard to find this very small well, reasonably small grave marker on a wall and decided yes, that's the one I'm going to use, especially as it's Riddle, not Riddle.
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: You have Riddle's court, so there's other connections that she could have got the names elsewhere.
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: But you know what it's stuck?
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: It's stuck.
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: It's just become another part of the tapestry of the history of Greyfriars.
• 22:14
  Speaker 3: That's how I like to say it.
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: Once upon a time there would have been people very upset that people were coming in and wanting to visit a little dog and then having a gravestone for a little dog would have been very inappropriate at one time and people would have been very upset about that.
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: But it brought people in and again with Harry Potter whether she took the inspiration from there or not, it has become part of the folklore of Greyfriars.
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: It's there to stay.
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: You don't have to like it, but you know what?
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: Don't go in, don't listen to Harry.
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: Potter, don't go in.
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: It's a similar fact.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: You've actually touched on the second kind of obvious connection which I had to bring up, which of course is Greyfriars Bobby, and you walk into Greyfriars and right in front of you is Greyfriars Bobby's grave where he's buried, and obviously there's the little statue on the wall before you get into Greyfriars itself.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: But there's story of Greyfriars Bobby because I think obviously a lot of people know that because again there's been a movie made of it.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: So it's kind of the folklore around Greyfriars Bobby.
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: It was interesting because I was reading your book today about some people now deny that there was ever a dog, but there seems to have been evidence from newspapers at the time that there was a dog.
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: But that's a lovely story.
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: It's a very lovely story and now the one that most people know about was written by Eleanor Aitkinson, who was actually an American.
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: She'd never been to Scotland, she was an English teacher and it's quite obvious from her very good grasp of the dialect is that she must have spoken to a lot of Scottish migrants who had left Edinburgh.
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: You know they'd gone there and she heard this story because the story of it being an old shepherd that that's the one that she wrote about and it's more likely to have been John Grey the watchman.
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: The thing is that from the newspaper reports you know we have when Bobby was taken up because he didn't have his license we actually have, like the London Illustrated News there are newspaper reports that did say that Bobby existed In one form or another.
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: There was this little dog who captured the imagination and the heart of all these people.
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: There's a photograph of Mr Trail and his family with Bobby.
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: I mean, okay, bobby seems to change a little bit over the years.
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: So you know, we don't know enough to certainly say it was the same dog the whole time, but we can certainly say there was a dog that got people thinking and obviously the fountain that's outside was Baroness Coots who had that created and she was one of the patrons of the RSPCA at the time.
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: So obviously in Scotland we have the SSPCA now, but at that time it was the RSPCA and she paid for that fountain to be put there.
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: At the bottom you have the, basically for dogs to drink from, then you have the bird bath and then there used to be little cups on it so humans could drink from it as well.
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: And unfortunately, bobby whichever Bobby, the Bobby that that statue comes from he died before the fountain was completed.
• 25:10
  Speaker 3: And sometimes tour guides will say to you that it was turned around the other way.
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: It wasn't.
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: It's always been that way.
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: Nobody has turned it around.
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: It's the way it always has been.
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: But you know what?
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: The legend of Bobby.
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: People are still talking about him.
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: I mean, I don't agree with every story I hear people say about him, but they're talking about him.
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: They're keeping this little dog alive in people's minds.
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: And that's the same with Grey Friars.
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: I often say to people even just by reading people's names, you're bringing back these people who wanted to be remembered or people who wanted them to be remembered.
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: And you know what, as much as I don't like it.
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: So what if people go looking for Lord Voldemort and they stand at Captain Thomas Riddell's grave Because you know what?
• 25:54
  Speaker 3: It might not be the way he wanted to be remembered, but people are still reading his name, they're bringing him back, even if they're not thinking about him themselves.
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: That's the fabric of Greyfriars, isn't it?
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: I think the thing is as well is that this is all of the fabric of the history of Edinburgh and you can't.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: To me, if you go into Edinburgh, you will feel the history of Edinburgh just walking down the Royal Mile.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: You will feel it everywhere, but understanding it and learning a bit about it whether it's the stories or the experience of actually going in Greyfriars, having a look around, feeling the whole history of the area and just trying to understand a little bit of what it was like for people living in Edinburgh hundreds of years ago.
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: And one of the good things is the other thing I should really mention.
• 26:38
  Speaker 3: I'm actually the current chair of the Friends of Greyfriars Courtyard as well.
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: I can't get away from the place, so people don't need to be able to go to Edinburgh to join that.
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: You can actually join to be one of the Friends of Greyfriars Courtyard and members can.
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: They can pay anything from five pounds 20 pounds, because we don't want to keep it from anybody.
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: In fact, our current vice chair, she's actually in America because we set this up during COVID.
• 27:07
  Speaker 3: So that's why our deputy chair, lexie, she's over there in America.
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: So you know, there's people from all over the world who can get such a love of Greyfriars and there's going to be some fantastic projects.
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: We did do a guidebook, which was a community-based project, which got a lot of people involved, people who are interested in Greyfriars.
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: But then we also managed to get some of the local community people who have lived and grown up around Greyfriars.
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: They see that as their garden basically, and so they have a very different relationship with it as well.
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: Quite often I have chatted to a lot of local residents and it's lovely in the summer.
• 27:44
  Speaker 3: You see people having picnics and it's a lovely area and there's so many people that it's so special to them for and for very, very different reasons.
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: And none of these reasons are wrong.
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: There's not a wrong reason to love Greyfriars or to have a connection with it, but I think we all feel like it belongs to us because it's so special to us all.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: So it can be a difficult one sometimes, but by getting involved with the Friends of Greyfriars it gives you a voice that you can give an opinion on things and with those voices we can pass those on to the council, we can pass those on to Edinburgh World Heritage and it's just a way for people to, you know, take care of it.
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: Even if we can't actually do much, we can document, we can try and just save things, even researching people, bringing those people back again just for a little while.
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: You know it's a really lovely thing to do.
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: I totally agree, charlotte, and I'll just mention your book as well, which I spent this afternoon reading, which was fascinating, it was great, which is called Greyfriars Graveyard.
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: So I will put a link to that in the show notes as well and also the link for Greyfriars for people to join through the website.
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: That'd be great.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: We can put that in.
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: I'm going to end the podcast.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: I'll say thanks so much for talking about it.
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: It's just fascinating.
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: Honestly, I could talk to you for hours about this and I know people are going to be really interested and I would recommend, when you go to Edinburgh, do pop over to Greyfriars and have a look around.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: So I'm going to ask you one question.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: I ask at the end of every episode, so I did that last week and this week I'm going to say what would be your one word of advice, one tip you would give to somebody visiting Edinburgh for the first time, and also, you could say, somebody visiting Greyfriars for the first time.
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: Well, obviously I would say get this a fantastic book.
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely To me, as much as I'm saying that there is actually, I go into all the symbology.
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: So if you want to know why this is skull and crossbone, you want to know why there's an hourglass, you want to know why there's certain flowers, that's all in there and you can use that in any Presbyterian graveyard.
• 29:42
  Speaker 3: You doesn't just have to be Greyfriars so you can use that.
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: Another piece of advice I would give people if you're going to Greyfriars, go in the church.
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: You know, go in the church.
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: They have a wonderful museum in there and it goes all into about how the National Covenant was signed.
• 29:58
  Speaker 3: It does a little bit about Bobby and in fact inside the church, in the museum, we actually have the remains of Bobby too, as we call him, who was a little dog who was in the 1952 Greyfriars Bobby.
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: That little dog is in a little casket that was made from one of the trees that came down.
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: He'd been buried near Laswade and basically the family who had taken on the star Bobby, he was buried there and then they found out that there was this housing going to be built.
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: So the great nephew.
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: He spent nearly two years trying to find where Bobby was buried, found Bobby, they were able to cremate him.
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: He was put in a basket.
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: He was then gifted to the bereavement services at Edinburgh City Council and Edinburgh City Council have put him on long term loan to the Cork so you could actually go in and learn the story about the little dog that played Bobby.
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: And he's there as well now.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: Oh well, I have to say I'm going to put my hand up and say this point I actually have not been inside the Kirk.
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: I've actually been the Greyfriars, but I haven't actually been inside.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: So I will do that next time, charlotte.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: So thanks so much for that tip.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: So thanks again for coming on to the podcast and we know we're going to schedule an episode soon to talk about Outlander.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: So if you're an Outlander fan, you need to keep an eye out for when that episode's coming out, because that's going to be an exciting episode.
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: So thanks so much for coming on again.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much, tracy, and we'll speak again soon.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: Well, that was another absolutely fantastic episode with Charlotte.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: Remember that Charlotte is one of the private driver tour guides with Edinburgh Black Cab Tours, so you can always meet Charlotte and the gang if you book a tour with them.
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: I just want to remind you that there's show notes for this episode with the links to everything with Charlotte and I talked about including Charlotte's excellent book about Greyfriars.
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: We'll be in this week's show notes at uktravelplanetcom.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: Forward slash episode 88, as usual.
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: That just leaves me to say until next week's episode, happy UK travel planning.