Greyfriars Kirk

My name is Owen Innes, and there are plenty of places in Scotland where history and legend sit so close together that it can sometimes be difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh is certainly one of those places.

Walk through the gates today and you'll find a place that is beautiful, atmospheric, and depending on the time of day, just a little bit unsettling.

There are old gravestones everywhere that you look, great stone monuments, as well as family vaults and the remains of the old churchyard walls, but tucked away in one corner is a small, dark, domed mausoleum.

Because sometimes history produces people who are much more interesting than the legends that grow up around them.

And sometimes, unfortunately for the person involved, the legend is rather difficult to shake.

So tonight we're heading back to the 17th century Scotland, to the Covenanters, to the reign of Charles II, to executions, imprisonment, and religious persecution, back to Greyfriars Kirkyard, and eventually to a mausoleum that has acquired a reputation for being one of the most unpleasant places in Edinburgh to visit after dark.

This is the story of Sir George Bloody Mackenzie.

Let's take a walk and see.

[gentle music] Now, there are places in this old world where the dead rest easy, sleeping off the centuries beneath clover and soft rain, and then there's Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, a sunken, soot-choked acre where the earth has swallowed so much misery that the soil itself seems to hold a grudge.

Now, if you ask the locals who wander the wet cobbles of Auld Reekie, they'll tell you straight, "Some graves are best left well alone, and some men were so wicked in the flesh that the devil himself didn't want them stirring the ashes down below." Oh, no.

Now, to understand the terror that haunts that graveyard today, we have to wind the clock back to the late 1600s when King Charles II sat upon the throne and Scotland was tearing itself to pieces over God and conscience.

Now, the man appointed to break their spirits was the Lord Advocate, Sir George Mackenzie.

Now, Mackenzie was an educated man, a scholar, and a lawyer, but beneath that powdered wig beat a heart made of cold, flinty steel.

He threw those captured souls into a walled-off open air corner of Greyfriars Kirk, what folks now call the Covenanters Prison, where over four bitter months of sleet, rain, and snow, he kept them penned with no roof over their heads and barely four ounces of bread a day.

Hundreds starved.