Rosebank Cemetery, opened in 1846, is still in use for burials.

This photo is available on Redbubble: The rose remembers.

This photo is available on Redbubble: Autumn graves at sunset.

Rosebank Cemetery was opened in 1846 by the Edinburgh and Leith Cemetery Company. The cemetery includes a mass grave, marked by a Celtic cross, of 215 men of the Royal Scots who came from Edinburgh and Leith and who were killed in the Gretna Rail Disaster of 1915. The cemetery also contains the memorials of many Leith ship-owners and merchants, and of two servants of Queen Victoria. There is also a small Moslem section.

This photo is available on Redbubble: Autumn in Rosebank Cemetery.

This photo is available on Redbubble: City graves.

Taken this afternoon just before sunset. Rosebank Cemetery, off Pilrig Street, was opened in 1846 by the Edinburgh and Leith Cemetery Company. It is still in use for burials.

This photo is available on Redbubble: Sunset in Rosebank Cemetery.

St Cuthbert’s beyond the wall of St John’s graveyard: green leaves.

This photo is available on Redbubble: Graves and leaves.

My result for The Perception Personality Image Test…

I won’t make a habit of posting this kind of thing – it’s just a quiz! but I was pleased/amused by this result.

NBPC – The Daydreamer

Nature, Background, Big Picture, and Color

Take The Perception Personality Image Test at HelloQuizzy

Anne Rutherford was born in 1739: she descends from the Haliburtons of Newmains, who have the hereditary right of burial in Dryburgh Abbey. The Rutherfords were a clan of Border warriors and reivers, “celebrated in many a family legend”. Jean Swinton, her mother, was of “one of the oldest families in Scotland, claiming descent from the Earls of Douglas”. John Rutherford, her father, was Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh: he had been appointed to the Chair of Theory and Practice of Medicine in 1726 after studying in Leyden under Herman Boerhaave. (Family Background)

In April 1758, Anne Rutherford married Walter Scott: the Scotts are described as “a bellicose and litigious clan who since the tenth century had played a prominent role in the warfare and internecine strife that wracked the Border region”. She had 13 children: six of whom died in infancy. The ninth son, born 15th August 1771, was named Walter after his father, and survived an early bout of polio to become one of the most successful and influential writers in Scotland: his memorial stands at the East End of Princes Street, and Waverley Station is named after his most famous novel. (Poet, Novelist)

Anne Rutherford’s husband Walter Scott died in 1799: Anne Rutherford died in 1819. As Scottish custom was until well into the 20th century, she was buried under her own name, in the small enclosure at the east end of St Johns Cathedral at the West End of Princes Street.

This photo is available on Redbubble: Anne Rutherford.

This windowless tower is the most visible part of St Cuthbert’s graveyard, to a passer-by on Lothian Road or Kings Stables Road or Castle Terrace. It was built in 1827 to allow a watch to be kept on the graveyard after a body had been buried.

I took these photos here. They’re all on Redbubble: St Cuthberts.

St Cuthbert’s graveyard is well below the level of Lothian Road. There are vaults with graves below the pavement of Lothian Road. No internments have been carried out in this graveyard since 1875: passers-by are walking over old graves.

In 1127, King David I granted a Charter that gave “all the land below the Castle” to the church of St Cuthbert’s. This church was built 1892-94, but there has been a church on this site since at least 1077.

The parish of St Cuthberts is now in the centre of the city, just below Lothian Road. But through much of its history it was outside Edinburgh: the parish was countryside, marsh and wilderness.

In 1505, the Barber Surgeons of Edinburgh were formally incorporated as a Craft Guild of the city, as a body concerned with the maintenance and promotion of the highest standards of surgical practice.

By the 1700s, the Barber Surgeons had become the Barber Apothecaries, and Edinburgh Council, which provided bodies to the surgeons, couldn’t keep up with the demand. (To be fair, they were supposed to supply the corpses of executed criminals, and no one would have wanted them to execute more people just to be able to provide more subjects for anatomy lessons.)

From the St Cuthbert parish records, by 1738 the robbing of graves from St Cuthberts graveyard to provide dead bodies to the Surgeon Apothecaries of Edinburgh had become a serious problem. The churchyard wall was raised in height. In 1803, the parish provided funds for a regular watch. In 1827, the parish built this tower. (I think the increasing level of precaution represents the increasing number of well-off people in the parish. The New Town was being built, and the Nor Loch was drained: St Cuthberts wasn’t an isolated country parish any more.)

By 1837, the law had changed, allowing a person to donate a cadaver to medical research, and from then on grave-robbing was no longer a profitable profession.

Since the graveyard at St Cuthbert’s stopped being used in 1875, the City of Edinburgh District Council took over the upkeep.