Greyfriars Bobby & Candlemaker Row

Why is it significant?

There he is, on top of a granite drinking fountain: a little bronze Skye terrier, his nose rubbed shiny by thousands of hopeful hands. Please resist joining them... the city has had to repair that nose more than once.

Key Facts

Open the walk

There he is, on top of a granite drinking fountain: a little bronze Skye terrier, his nose rubbed shiny by thousands of hopeful hands. Please resist joining them... the city has had to repair that nose more than once. This is Greyfriars Bobby, perhaps the most famous dog in Scotland, and his story has been told so often that it has become literature in its own right.

The version everyone knows goes like this. In 1858 a man called John Gray, who worked as a night watchman for the Edinburgh police, died and was buried in the kirkyard behind the gates beside you. His little dog refused to leave the grave. For fourteen years, the story goes, Bobby slept on it night after night, slipping out only to be fed in the eating houses nearby, until he died himself in 1872.

In 1867 a new law said that unlicensed dogs could be destroyed. The Lord Provost, William Chambers, himself a famous publisher, paid for Bobby's licence and gave him a collar, which you can still see in the Museum of Edinburgh on the Canongate. A year after the dog died, the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts paid for this fountain, with a low trough at the bottom so that thirsty dogs could drink too.

Then the writers took over. In 1912 an American novelist, Eleanor Atkinson, published Greyfriars Bobby, a sentimental book that turned the terrier into an international star, and in 1961 Disney made it into a film. The odd detail is that Atkinson is said never to have visited Edinburgh at all. The most famous dog story of this city was written from the other side of the Atlantic.

Some historians have argued that the truth was less touching: that local traders kept the legend going because it brought in visitors, and that one Bobby may even have been quietly replaced by another. Nobody can prove it either way, and the dog has kept his place in the city's heart. On your way up Candlemaker Row you passed the old hall of the candlemakers' guild. Now follow Forrest Road south and turn right along Lauriston Place, to a palace built with a goldsmith's money.