Canongate Tolbooth: The Witch Pricker and Dunbar's Close

Why is it significant?

Finish your journey on the lower Royal Mile before the charming stone turrets and projecting clock face of the Canongate Tolbooth, completed in fifteen ninety-one.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Finish your journey on the lower Royal Mile before the charming stone turrets and projecting clock face of the Canongate Tolbooth, completed in fifteen ninety-one. Notice how its pepper-pot turrets and high crow-stepped gables echo French chateau architecture, reflecting the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France. For centuries, this was the town hall, court of justice, and lockup for the independent burgh of Canongate.

Look up at the narrow slit windows on the upper floor. In the seventeenth century, notorious witch pricker John Kincaid was brought here by magistrates to examine suspected witches. Kincaid drove three-inch brass needles deep into suspects' flesh, claiming that any patch of skin that did not bleed or feel pain was the Devil's mark. Kincaid was eventually unmasked as a fraud who pocketed huge fees for manufactured guilty verdicts.

Just steps down the street, duck into the quiet oasis of Dunbar's Close Garden. Laid out in authentic seventeenth-century knot-garden style with trimmed box hedges and espalier fruit trees, it was named after writer David Dunbar, whose ghost is said to linger among the evening shadows.

Rest on a stone bench in the garden as church bells chime down the Royal Mile. You have walked through four centuries of Edinburgh's most captivating, spine-tingling legends.