Grassmarket

The Grassmarket sits in a broad, sunken plaza beneath the towering southern cliff of Castle Rock, and it has been one of Edinburgh's most vibrant and volatile public spaces for over five hundred years. Originally established as a cattle and horse market in 1477, this wide, rectangular square has served at various points in its history as a marketplace, a site of public executions, a notorious slum, and — in its modern incarnation — one of Edinburgh's most popular dining, drinking, and social destinations. Through it all, the Castle has watched from above, an ever-present reminder of the authority that once dispensed justice and punishment in the square below.

The Grassmarket's association with execution is perhaps its most enduring historical characteristic. From the fifteenth century until the mid-eighteenth century, the public gallows stood at the eastern end of the square, and hangings were major public spectacles attended by crowds of thousands. The most significant executions were those of the Covenanters — Presbyterian dissidents who refused to accept royal authority over the Scottish church. Over a hundred Covenanters were hanged in the Grassmarket between 1661 and 1688, and a memorial cross at the eastern end of the square, erected in 1937, commemorates their sacrifice. The inscription reads: 'For the Protestant faith on this spot many martyrs and Covenanters died.'

The Grassmarket was also a centre of the body-snatching trade that terrorised Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century. William Burke and William Hare, the city's most infamous serial killers, operated from a lodging house in nearby Tanner's Close. They murdered at least sixteen people between 1827 and 1828, selling the bodies to Dr Robert Knox of the Edinburgh Medical School for use in anatomy lectures. Burke was eventually hanged in the Lawnmarket in January 1829, and his skeleton is still displayed at the University of Edinburgh's Anatomical Museum — a grim footnote to a grim chapter.

The architecture surrounding the Grassmarket tells the story of Edinburgh's social evolution. The oldest surviving buildings date from the seventeenth century and include several former coaching inns whose arched entrances once admitted horse-drawn carriages from the road to Lanark and Glasgow. The White Hart Inn, which has occupied its site since at least 1516, claims to be one of Edinburgh's oldest pubs and was visited by Robert Burns and William Wordsworth. The buildings on the north side of the square, pressed against the base of Castle Rock, display the characteristic Edinburgh mixture of stone, crow-stepped gables, and forestair entrances that gives the Old Town its distinctive vertical character.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Grassmarket declined into one of Edinburgh's most deprived areas, known for overcrowded lodging houses, poverty, and alcoholism. The area was the setting for much of Irvine Welsh's work on Edinburgh's underclass, and its hostels continued to serve the city's homeless population well into the late twentieth century. The regeneration of the Grassmarket began in the 1990s and has accelerated dramatically since the turn of the millennium. Today, the square is lined with independent restaurants, craft beer bars, boutique shops, and several of Edinburgh's most characterful pubs.

The Grassmarket's physical setting remains its greatest asset. The square is overlooked on its north side by the sheer cliff of Castle Rock, rising nearly eighty metres above the cobblestones and crowned by the Castle's Half Moon Battery. The Vennel Steps, a steep pedestrian stairway at the square's western end, climb to the old town wall and provide what many consider the most dramatic view of Edinburgh Castle available anywhere in the city. At dusk, when the Castle is floodlit against the darkening sky and the warm glow of the Grassmarket's pub windows spills across the cobblestones, the scene achieves a quality of atmospheric perfection that photography struggles to capture.

The Grassmarket is Edinburgh at its most unvarnished and unpretentious. It does not curate its history or hide its darker chapters behind velvet ropes. The execution site, the Covenanters' memorial, the body-snatching trail, and the lively modern hospitality scene all coexist within a single medieval square, and the result is a place of extraordinary depth and complexity.