Canongate Kirk

Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, is buried in a modest grave in this kirkyard, and for most of the twentieth century almost nobody noticed. The author of 'The Wealth of Nations' — arguably the most influential book on capitalism ever written — lived his final years in nearby Panmure House on Lochend Close and died in 1790. His grave received little attention until Edinburgh's financial sector, perhaps embarrassed that the world's most famous economist was rotting in obscurity, funded a restoration and proper memorial. There's a certain irony in the free market needing a charitable donation to honour its founder.

The kirkyard's other literary story involves a poet rescuing a poet. Robert Burns visited Edinburgh in 1787 and was appalled that Robert Fergusson — the young poet whose work had inspired Burns to become a writer himself — lay in an unmarked grave. Fergusson had died in the Edinburgh lunatic asylum in 1774 at just twenty-four years old. Burns paid for a memorial headstone, declaring that Fergusson's genius deserved recognition. The headstone was eventually erected in 1789, and Burns himself composed the epitaph. Burns died seven years later, in 1796.

The kirk itself was founded in 1688 after James VII evicted the Canongate congregation from Holyrood Abbey to turn it into a chapel for the Order of the Thistle. Completed in 1691, the church has a distinctive Dutch-style gable end facing the Canongate, crowned by a gilded stag's head — a reference to the founding legend of Holyrood Abbey, in which a stag with a cross between its antlers saved King David I from death.

The Canongate Kirkyard is also the resting place of Mrs Agnes Maclehose — Burns's "Clarinda" — with whom he conducted one of literature's most passionate epistolary love affairs. Their letters remain some of the finest romantic writing in the English language.