Greyfriars Kirk & Kirkyard

A Skye Terrier named Bobby sat on his master's grave here for fourteen years, from 1858 until his own death in 1872, becoming the most famous dog in Scottish history. His master, police constable John Gray, died of tuberculosis and was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard. Bobby reportedly refused to leave, braving Edinburgh's brutal winters beside the headstone. When the city introduced a dog licence in 1867, the Lord Provost himself paid Bobby's fee to prevent him being put down. His statue, nose shiny from a century of rubbing, sits at the entrance to the kirkyard.

But Greyfriars' true historical weight lies in a document signed inside the kirk on 28 February 1638. The National Covenant was a defiant declaration against Charles I's attempts to impose Anglican worship on Presbyterian Scotland. Thousands of Scots signed it, some reportedly in their own blood. The movement it launched would cost tens of thousands of lives and help trigger the English Civil War. After the Covenanters' defeat at the Battle of Bothwell Brig in 1679, some 1,200 prisoners were held in a field adjacent to the kirkyard for months — exposed to the elements, starved, and eventually executed or transported. That field, now called the Covenanters' Prison, is still walled off from the main churchyard.

The kirk itself was built between 1602 and 1620 on the grounds of a dissolved Franciscan friary — the "grey friars" who gave it its name wore grey habits. The graveyard is one of Edinburgh's most atmospheric, with elaborate seventeenth-century monuments, skull-and-crossbones carvings, and locked iron mortsafes designed to foil body-snatchers during the era of Burke and Hare.

Harry Potter fans hunt for familiar names here: Tom Riddell (a real Edinburgh merchant), William McGonagall (the notoriously bad poet), and several Moodie headstones are scattered among the graves. J.K. Rowling lived around the corner while writing the early books, and the view of George Heriot's School from the kirkyard is said to have inspired Hogwarts.