Greyfriars Kirkyard

The kirkyard — the walled graveyard, the monuments, Bobby's headstone, the paths — is owned by the City of Edinburgh Council. Day-to-day maintenance is done by the council's bereavement team, and the kirk's own website says so, adding that anything you find wrong out there, from litter to discarded needles to anti-social behaviour, should be reported to the council rather than to the church: bereavement@edinburgh.gov.uk. It is public ground, and it is open 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

Greyfriars Kirk is the church building in the middle. It is a separate visit, run by its congregation, free to enter with donations encouraged, staffed by volunteer welcomers, with information boards for a self-guided route in several languages and a small museum. And it publishes no fixed opening hours. Its site carries an "Opening Times" navigation item; the page behind it gives location and accessibility and no hours at all. What it publishes instead is a calendar that marks individual days open or closed.

The practical consequence is that you can plan the kirkyard to the minute and cannot plan the kirk at all. Check the Visit page on the morning you go, and if the interior matters to you, do not come in August.

August is the month the church is least likely to be open

In the kirk's own words: "throughout August, we are proud to be a Fringe Festival venue. Therefore, we are closed for general visiting many days in August, but we have a full programme of ticketed Fringe events available." So the month when Edinburgh is fullest is the month the building is emptiest of ordinary visitors — unless you buy a ticket to a show in it, which is a real option and gets you inside the same walls.

The kirkyard is unaffected. It stays open through the Fringe at every hour, which is also when it is at its busiest with tour groups, so early morning is worth more in August than in any other month.

The story as it is told: John Gray, a nightwatchman with the Edinburgh City Police, died of tuberculosis on 15 February 1858 and was buried in this kirkyard. His dog Bobby — a Skye terrier by tradition, more likely a Dandie Dinmont on recent scholarship — is said to have kept to the grave for fourteen years until his own death on 14 January 1872, having been born on 4 May 1855.

The story as historians treat it: with caution. Jan Bondeson's work counts around sixty documented cemetery-dog stories in nineteenth-century Europe, several of them commercially useful to the pub or the churchyard concerned, and questions whether one animal survived the full fourteen years or whether more than one dog carried the name. The kirkyard itself publishes nothing that settles it. Both versions are worth carrying with you, because a guide will tell you one and the plaque will imply the other.

What is physically here is easier. Bobby's headstone stands near the entrance, erected by the Dog Aid Society of Scotland and unveiled by the Duke of Gloucester on 13 May 1981 — modern, and marking a reputed rather than a recorded spot, since the kirkyard is consecrated ground throughout and the dog may equally have been buried under a tree outside the gate. A further monument went up near the kirk's east wall in 2021, on the 150th anniversary of his death. John Gray's own grave, where the dog is said to have slept, lies on the eastern path about thirty metres north of the entrance, and the stone on it is modern too: the grave was originally unmarked.

The statue, and why you should keep your hands off it

The bronze on the plinth at the junction of George IV Bridge and Candlemaker Row, opposite the kirkyard gate, was made by the sculptor William Brodie in 1872 and paid for by Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts; the plinth was originally a drinking fountain, with a bowl for dogs at street level.

Somewhere around 2012 a habit started of rubbing the dog's nose for luck. It is not an old tradition and it is not harmless: the rubbing strips the protective patina, the bare bronze weathers, and the nose now sits gold against a dark statue. The City of Edinburgh Council has asked visitors to stop — a council spokeswoman put it, with the straightest face available, as "while he enjoys attention from visitors and loves to have his photo taken, Bobby gets distressed when people rub his nose". The council restored the dark finish in 2013; the repair was deliberately scrubbed back off within days, causing about £300 of damage, and was treated as vandalism.

The useful version for a visitor: photograph it, do not touch it. A photograph of a statue with a black nose is a better photograph anyway.

The history first, because the ground and the name do not quite match. After the Covenanters' defeat at Bothwell Bridge on 22 June 1679, around 1,200 prisoners were brought to Edinburgh; with no room in the tolbooth or the castle, about 400 were held in a field on the south side of this kirkyard, enclosed by the Flodden Wall on two sides, by George Heriot's School's high wall on the west, and by a picket fence towards the graveyard. They were held there through the summer.

The name Covenanters' Prison stuck to the ground.

Why those vaults are not the cells, and why the gate is shut

The vaulted tombs in that corner are not the cells. Most of the field was built over by the city Bedlam around 1690, and the surviving strip between it and the school was taken into the burial ground about 1700, when the fashion was for enclosed vaults. They post-date the imprisonment by two decades.

The gate went on around 1990. The area had been open to view until then, and the City of Edinburgh Council locked it to stop persistent vandalism and use by drug users — the same problem the kirk's own site still asks visitors to report today. It has stayed locked since.

The Mackenzie poltergeist, said plainly

The domed tomb of Sir George Mackenzie — Lord Advocate under Charles II, the prosecutor the Covenanters called Bloody Mackenzie, and, architecturally, a fine Italianate piece by James Smith modelled on Bramante's Tempietto — stands beside the locked corner. Since 1999 the tour that goes in there has reported hundreds of physical "attacks" on visitors, and it is the best-known ghost claim in the city.

Our position is the site's usual one: it is an excellent evening out and it is not evidence. Nothing about it is published by the kirk or the council, no record supports it, and the operator that reports the attacks is the operator selling the tickets. Go for the storytelling, in the dark, in a locked graveyard, which is genuinely a memorable ninety minutes — and read the ghost tours page if you want the full comparison of the underground alternatives, most of which are cheaper and none of which unlocks this gate.

One piece of documented damage is worth knowing, because it explains the sealed ventilation slot: in 2003 two teenagers, aged 17 and 15, got into the Mackenzie tomb through the rear vent, broke open coffins in the lower vault and took a skull. They were charged under the old offence of violating sepulchres.

The kirkyard opened in August 1562 by royal grant, to replace the burial ground at St Giles' in the middle of town. The burgh council's reasoning, minuted on 23 April 1561, was blunt about why: the kirkyard there had no room left, and something had to be done about "the savour and inconvenientis that may follow thairupoun in the heit of somer" — a burial place further from the middle of the town was required. The St Giles' ground stopped being used around 1600. The name comes from the Franciscan friary that stood here until 1560; grey habits, grey friars.

On 28 February 1638 the National Covenant was signed here. Part of the signing happened in the kirk in front of the pulpit and part in the graveyard, which was used because it was a place of free legal public assembly — the popular image of Covenanters leaning on flat table stones to sign is wrong on one detail, since central gravestones were banned at the time and those stones did not yet exist. The document asserted, in the kirk's own summary, "the right of ordinary people to exercise their God-given consciences in matters of faith and life". You can see an original copy in the Kirk Museum inside the building, and another in St Giles' Cathedral up the hill, in the Chepman Aisle.

What followed is the reason half the monuments here are what they are: the wars of the three kingdoms, the killing time, the Martyrs' Monument commemorating executed Covenanters, and, forty-one years after the signing, four hundred prisoners in the field over the wall.

Construction began in 1602 and the kirk opened on Christmas Day 1620 — the first church built in Edinburgh after the Reformation, on the site of the friary that gave the place its name. A second congregation, New Greyfriars, was added within the same shell by 1722; the two were reunited during the reconstruction of 1931–38, which is when the Californian redwood ceiling went in. Two events in between explain the patchwork: a gunpowder store in the tower blew up in 1718 and wrecked the west end, and a fire in 1845 gutted the interiors of both churches. Cromwell's troops used the building as a barracks between 1650 and 1653.

What to look at: the Kirk Museum, which holds an original copy of the National Covenant; the Victorian stained glass, including an east window of the parables; and the Peter Collins organ of 1990, with nearly 3,400 pipes. Information boards give you a self-guided route in several languages, and volunteer welcomers are usually on hand — the kirk describes over 400 years of its own history as the thing they are there to explain.

Tours run on donations rather than tickets. The volunteer-led history tours are pay-what-you-can and can be booked through Eventbrite or joined on the day; a bespoke tour arranged in advance carries a recommended donation of £10 per person (about $14), reduced for children and for groups over fifteen, and is arranged by phone or email. Everything depends on the kirk being open that day, which is why the Visit page calendar is the first thing to check.

Access, and the practical detail

The kirk states level access and toilet facilities for visitors with limited mobility, and Blue Badge parking can be arranged through the office on request. Street parking sits on Chambers Street and Lauriston Place, and the building is inside Edinburgh's Low Emission Zone — a vehicle that does not meet the standards can be fined for driving through it, which is a real risk for anyone in a hire car.

The kirkyard itself is a different surface entirely: gravel and worn paths, sloping in places, unlit at night beyond the street lights around it. It is a working burial ground before it is a visitor attraction, and it is signposted as such.

• Buses: 2, 9, 23, 27, 35 and 45 stop nearby, on the kirk's own list.
• Waverley station: about ten minutes' walk, per the kirk; the getting around page has fares and the tram.
• Contact: administrator@greyfriarskirk.com, 0131 225 1900.
• Report a problem in the kirkyard: bereavement@edinburgh.gov.uk — the council, not the church.

The mural monuments along the east and west walls. These are the reason art historians come. Early seventeenth-century, dense with the symbolism of mortality and resurrection — the death's head, the Angel of the Resurrection, the King of Terrors — and mostly in the older northern part of the yard. They are carved for people who expected you to read them.

The mortsafes. Two low iron cages sit over graves. They were rented, not bought: they held a body long enough to spoil for the resurrection men who supplied Edinburgh's medical school with corpses, and they are the physical evidence of a trade the city usually tells as the Burke and Hare story. The enclosed lairs with solid walls and railings along the south edge were built for the same reason.

The Martyrs' Monument. Commemorating executed Covenanters, and the reason the prisoners' field over the wall carries the name it does.

The Mackenzie mausoleum. The domed Italianate tomb by James Smith, modelled on Bramante's Tempietto, standing beside the locked corner.

The names. Buried here, among many others: James Craig, who designed the New Town; the mathematician Colin Maclaurin; the Gaelic poet Duncan Ban MacIntyre, whose memorial was restored in 2005 for about £3,000 raised by public subscription; the poet William McGonagall; the architect James Gillespie Graham; and John Gray, whose dog you have already met. Some of the most famous graves are unmarked, including the inventor William Ged's.

The photographic connection. In the 1840s David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson used this kirkyard as a set for some of the earliest photographic portraits and tableaux ever made, including The Artist and The Gravedigger. You are standing in one of the first outdoor studios in the history of the medium.

The facts: the kirkyard contains a stone for Thomas Riddell, a grave for the poet William McGonagall, and a Moodie among the burials, and George Heriot's School — four towers around a quadrangle — stands immediately over the west wall. J. K. Rowling wrote parts of the books in cafés a few minutes away, which the whole city knows.

What is not on record: any statement tying those particular stones to those particular names. No source in this kirkyard claims it, the kirk publishes nothing about it, and no film was shot here — the operator of one of the Potter walks says so plainly in its own listing. The link is inference by tour guides, repeated until it hardened. That does not make it worthless; it makes it folklore about a book, in a graveyard already full of folklore, and it is more enjoyable when nobody is pretending.

The practical version: the Riddell stone is small, easy to miss, and often has a queue of three or four people around it. Do not put anything on it or lean on it; it is a real grave and the enthusiasm has already worn its lettering. If the film-tourism route is what you came for, the Harry Potter hub compares the tours that do it well, and the two-hour walk that comes through here also covers Victoria Street and the Grassmarket, where the connection is at least architectural.

If you want the locked corner: the City of the Dead haunted graveyard tour is the only one that opens it, at £13 (about $18), and it runs at 21:00 in summer and 20:30 in winter on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Over-12s only, and the operator rules out anyone with walking difficulties or a heart condition, and pregnant visitors. It is not sold on the platforms we work with, so we link the operator's own booking page and earn nothing from it.

If you want the underground as well: the haunted vaults and graveyard tour at £21.06 (about $29) is the one that pairs this kirkyard with the South Bridge vaults, ninety minutes, suggested for ages 12 and up. It is the busiest ghost product in the city and it is rated 4.6 from 7,268 reviews.

If you want history rather than hauntings: the two-hour Darkside walk at £17.60 (about $24) is a licensed guide on witch trials, public executions and the anatomists, at street level, ending in Canongate Kirkyard rather than underground. Rated 4.8 from 1,488 reviews. It talks about the vaults and does not go into them, which is either the point or the problem depending on what you booked for.

If you want Rowling's Edinburgh: the six-language Potter walk at £18 (about $25) comes in here for the Riddell stone and then leaves for Victoria Street.

If you want none of the above: you lose nothing. The kirkyard is free at every hour and the stones are the same stones. A guide buys you stories and the confidence to walk a graveyard after dark; there is no gate they open that daylight does not, except the one.

Going in after dark on your own

It is legal — the kirkyard has no closing time — and it is not much recommended. There is no lighting inside the walls, the paths are uneven, and the kirk's own site asks visitors to report anti-social behaviour to the council, which tells you what the corners are occasionally used for. If the dark is what you want, do it on a tour with twenty other people, or come at first light instead, which gives you the same emptiness with the low sun down the east wall and no need to explain yourself to anyone.

Come early. Between about 08:00 and 10:00 the walking tours have not started, the light runs along the east wall where the best monuments are, and you can stand in front of a seventeenth-century tomb without somebody's umbrella in the frame. Photograph the statue on the corner without touching it, find Bobby's headstone and John Gray's grave in the first five minutes so they are out of the way, then walk the north end slowly for the wall tombs and the mortsafes, which is what the kirkyard is actually good at.

Check the kirk's Visit page the same morning. If the building is open, give it twenty minutes for the Covenant in the museum and the redwood ceiling; if it is August, expect it to be shut and buy a Fringe ticket if you want inside. Skip the locked corner in daylight — there is nothing to do but look through a gate — and if it matters to you, book the evening tour that opens it instead.

Then keep moving: two minutes east puts you in the National Museum of Scotland for free, four minutes downhill puts you in the Grassmarket, and eight minutes north puts you in St Giles' Cathedral, which is where the other half of the Covenanters' story sits. The rest of the city, with the same hours-price-map treatment on every page, starts from our Edinburgh guide.