St Margaret's Well & the Debtors' Sanctuary
Why is it significant?
Bend down to the low stone front set into the grassy bank, with its small pointed opening. Inside, if you peer into the shadow, there is a vaulted chamber whose roof springs from a single central pillar, like a stone umbrella.
Key Facts
| Place | St Margaret's Well & the Debtors' Sanctuary |
|---|---|
| Address | Queen's Drive, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh EH8, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95090, -3.16840 |
| Part of Walk | Crowns, Kirks and Sanctuary: Edinburgh's Canongate and the Palace of Holyroodhouse |
| Generated | Generated |
Bend down to the low stone front set into the grassy bank, with its small pointed opening. Inside, if you peer into the shadow, there is a vaulted chamber whose roof springs from a single central pillar, like a stone umbrella. This is St Margaret's Well, and just like the apse where you started, it travelled here stone by stone from somewhere else.
The well-house was built in the fifteenth century at Restalrig, a village to the north-east, over a spring dedicated to Saint Margaret, the English-born queen of King Malcolm III, who died at Edinburgh Castle in 1093 and was made a saint in 1250. In 1860 railway works covered the old site, and the chamber was taken down and rebuilt here in the royal park.
You are standing in Holyrood Park, a royal hunting ground since the Middle Ages. James V enclosed it with a wall around 1540, and it still belongs to the Crown. Strangely, for centuries it was also a refuge. The abbey's ancient right of sanctuary covered its whole precinct, this park included, and long after the monks had gone, the law still respected it for one kind of fugitive: the debtor.
So the Abbey Lairds were born. Men who could not pay their debts fled past those brass letters S in the road, rented rooms in the cramped houses around Abbey Strand, and lived in safety, strolling over the crags with a view of the city that was hunting them. On Sundays, when no arrests for debt were allowed, they crossed into town to see friends, then hurried back before midnight. The writer Thomas De Quincey sheltered here from creditors in the 1830s.
The most glamorous Abbey Laird was royal. The Comte d'Artois, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, lived in the palace from 1796, partly to keep his creditors at bay, and came back in 1830 after losing his throne as Charles X of France. Imprisonment for debt in Scotland was abolished in 1880, and the sanctuary faded away. Now walk back to the Canongate and climb its left-hand side to the tall, severe house wedged among the Parliament buildings.