Grassmarket & The Covenanters' Gallows

Why is it significant?

Step into the center of the vast stone expanse of Grassmarket, right onto the circular raised paving marked with a carved gallows symbol. Look straight up at the dizzying basalt cliff of Edinburgh Castle looming four hundred feet above you.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step into the center of the vast stone expanse of Grassmarket, right onto the circular raised paving marked with a carved gallows symbol. Look straight up at the dizzying basalt cliff of Edinburgh Castle looming four hundred feet above you. For over a century, from sixteen sixty to seventeen eighty-four, this busy horse and cattle market was Edinburgh's permanent site for public executions.

Over one hundred Covenanter martyrs were hanged on the tall timber gallows that once stood right beneath your shoes during the Killing Time. Crowds of thousands gathered from surrounding taverns to witness the hangings, singing psalms and cheering condemned heroes who made defiant speeches from the scaffold ladder before the cart was pulled away.

The most extraordinary tale from this stone square is that of Half-Hangit Maggie Dickson. In seventeen twenty-four, Maggie, an unwed fishwife from Musselburgh, was convicted of concealing an infant pregnancy and hanged here until declared dead. Her body was nailed into a rough pine coffin and loaded onto a cart for burial. Halfway home, the cart driver stopped for ale and heard frantic banging inside the wooden lid: Maggie had survived!

Under Scots law, she had paid her debt to society and could not be hanged twice. Maggie lived for another forty years as a local celebrity. Walk west along the market toward the White Hart Inn.