Burns Monument & New Calton Burial Ground
Why is it significant?
Here is the second round temple of the walk, perched on the slope beside Regent Road, with a ring of columns and a crown of carved stone on top. This one belongs to a poet: Robert Burns.
Key Facts
| Place | Burns Monument & New Calton Burial Ground |
|---|---|
| Address | Regent Road, Edinburgh EH7 5BL, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95340, -3.17830 |
| Part of Walk | Calton Hill, Edinburgh: Monuments, Martyrs and the Athens of the North |
| Generated | Generated |
Here is the second round temple of the walk, perched on the slope beside Regent Road, with a ring of columns and a crown of carved stone on top. This one belongs to a poet: Robert Burns.
It was designed by Thomas Hamilton and built in the early 1830s, once again inspired by the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, the same model as the Dugald Stewart Monument up the hill. Inside, it originally sheltered a marble statue of Burns by the sculptor John Flaxman, but the damp did it no favours, and the statue was moved indoors long ago.
Burns himself arrived in Edinburgh in 1786, a farmer from Ayrshire who had just published a slim book of poems in Kilmarnock. The capital's salons went wild for him. Society hostesses passed him around, a new Edinburgh edition of his poems came out in 1787, and among the young people who met him was a fifteen-year-old boy called Walter Scott, who never forgot it.
Now look over the wall, down the slope below the road. That terraced cemetery is New Calton Burial Ground, opened around 1820 for the graves displaced by Waterloo Place. Near its top stands a small round watchtower. It was built to protect the newly buried from the resurrection men, the body-snatchers who dug up fresh corpses to sell to the city's anatomy schools. Families paid watchers to sit there through the night, until the Anatomy Act of 1832 finally gave the medical schools a legal supply. The lighthouse-building Stevensons have family graves down there too.
So on this one bend of the road you have the man Edinburgh adored and the dead it could not protect. The city of the Enlightenment had a very practical underside. Walk west along Regent Road toward the great columned building that looks like a Greek temple lying on its side along the hill.