Canongate Kirk: The King's Parish and Adam Smith's Grave
Why is it significant?
Stand in front of the curving, Dutch-style gable of Canongate Kirk and find the very top: a pair of stag's antlers with a cross rising between them. Down on the pavement, a young man in bronze strides past you, coat flapping, book in hand.
Key Facts
| Place | Canongate Kirk: The King's Parish and Adam Smith's Grave |
|---|---|
| Address | 153 Canongate, Edinburgh EH8 8BN, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95210, -3.18020 |
| Part of Walk | Crowns, Kirks and Sanctuary: Edinburgh's Canongate and the Palace of Holyroodhouse |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in front of the curving, Dutch-style gable of Canongate Kirk and find the very top: a pair of stag's antlers with a cross rising between them. Down on the pavement, a young man in bronze strides past you, coat flapping, book in hand. He is the poet Robert Fergusson, and those antlers belong to the oldest royal legend in Edinburgh.
This church exists because of a king's religion. In 1687 the Catholic King James VII took over the nave of Holyrood Abbey, which had been the Canongate's own parish church, and turned it into a Chapel Royal for his revived Order of the Thistle. The parishioners were thrown out. Money left decades earlier by a merchant called Thomas Moodie paid for this new kirk, finished around 1691. By then James had already fled and lost his throne.
It is still the parish church of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and members of the royal family worship here when they are in residence. In 2011 Zara Phillips, granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II, married the rugby player Mike Tindall in this church. On the gable, a carved royal coat of arms reminds everyone whose kirk this is.
Now slip into the kirkyard. Near its western side lies Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, who died in 1790 in a house a few steps away. And by the path is Fergusson's own grave, with a headstone paid for by Robert Burns in 1787. Burns worshipped him. Fergusson wrote brilliant poems in Scots about this very city and died in its asylum in 1774, at just twenty-four. Burns called him, in verse, by far my elder brother in the Muse.
Agnes Maclehose, the Clarinda of Burns's passionate letters, is buried here too, so the kirkyard is a kind of Enlightenment address book: economists, poets and lovers within a few metres of each other. The bronze Fergusson outside, by the sculptor David Annand, was only added in 2004. Leave by the gate, turn left down the Canongate, and slip into the narrow opening of Dunbar's Close on the same side of the street.