The White Hart Inn: Burke and Hare's Hunting Grounds

Why is it significant?

Stop right before the low-ceilinged stone portal of the White Hart Inn, whose timber beams have welcomed travelers since fifteen sixteen. You are standing outside what is widely recognized as the oldest continuously operating pub in central Edinburgh.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stop right before the low-ceilinged stone portal of the White Hart Inn, whose timber beams have welcomed travelers since fifteen sixteen. You are standing outside what is widely recognized as the oldest continuously operating pub in central Edinburgh. Robert Burns spent his last week in Edinburgh right inside this tavern in seventeen ninety-one, penning his heartbreaking poem Ae Fond Kiss.

But the pub conceals a far darker legacy. In eighteen twenty-eight, Edinburgh's medical schools were the most prestigious in the world, creating an insatiable demand for fresh cadavers for anatomical dissection. Two Irish immigrants living nearby, William Burke and William Hare, discovered they could earn ten pounds per body from Dr Robert Knox without the backbreaking labor of digging up graves.

Burke and Hare stalked lonely travelers and vulnerable souls right here in the White Hart. In eighteen twenty-eight, they bought whisky for an elderly traveler named Joseph and a local street boy named Daft Jamie, lured them into their nearby lodging house in Tanner's Close, and smothered them to death using a technique now known to forensics as burking.

When they were finally caught after sixteen murders, Hare turned king's evidence while Burke was hanged before twenty-five thousand cheering spectators. Burke's own skeleton still hangs inside the Edinburgh Medical School museum. Follow the Royal Mile down toward the Canongate Tolbooth.