The Real Mary King's Close: The Subterranean Plague Street

Why is it significant?

Step into the stone entryway of the Royal Exchange on the High Street, resting your hands on the chilly neoclassical pillars.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step into the stone entryway of the Royal Exchange on the High Street, resting your hands on the chilly neoclassical pillars. Beneath the soles of your boots lies a hidden underground world: Mary King's Close, a real seventeenth-century street completely buried when Edinburgh built the City Chambers over the tops of tenement houses in seventeen fifty-three.

In the sixteen hundreds, this narrow alleyway was among the most crowded residential quarters on Earth. Timber-and-stone tenements soared eight stories high, blocking all sunlight. Chamber pots were emptied twice daily straight out the windows with a shout of Gardyloo, while hundreds of merchants, weavers, and tradesmen bartered in the foul gloom.

In sixteen forty-five, the bubonic plague struck Edinburgh with apocalyptic fury, wiping out nearly half the population. Popular legend claimed the close was walled off to quarantine dying victims inside, though in reality heroic town doctors wearing beak-faced leather masks braved the stench to deliver bread and coal to surviving wretches trapped in subterranean tenements.

Visitors to the buried rooms frequently report phantom footsteps and the ghostly presence of Wee Annie, a young plague victim crying in the corner for her lost doll. Walk out into the crisp air toward St Giles' Cathedral.