Holyrood Abbey

The Canongate Borough developed separately from Edinburgh.

In 1140, King David I granted the canons of Holyrood Abbey, the community of clergy attached to the abbey, permission to establish a borough here.

Long strips of land ran back from either side of the main street, and over time these filled with houses, yards and closes as the settlement grew.

The name itself comes from those cannons and the Scots word gate, meaning a road or way.

This was long afterwards known as the Black Cross of Scotland.

It was to lodge it worthily that King David, the youngest son of Queen Margaret, built and endowed the Abbey of Holyrood, or Holy Cross, at Edinburgh.

The Queen was also a great benefactor to the Church of St. Andrews, afterwards the Metropolitan See of Scotland.

There too she erected a cross which was long regarded with peculiar veneration.

What they never adequately explained was the orchard and the two men lying in it untouched, which is necessarily suspicious.

Darnley was buried in the Royal Vault at Holyrood Abbey on February 14th, 1567, four days after the blast.

The vault was ransacked in the centuries that followed, and his remains were scattered and lost.

In 2016, a forensic art researcher at the University of Dundee, working for measurements, concluded that a skull once held in a London medical collection was probably his.