Even More Torture Tourism

Edinburgh is one of my favorite cities. Among it's quirks, along the High Street it features an unusual amount of "torture tourism:" underground attractions and guided tours to places where people were tortured (in the distant past, of course). And just to clear any potential misunderstanding, this is not why I'm fond of Edinburgh.

The Grassmarket is a 2-3 block area directly beneath Edinburgh Castle. Currently tourists don't have much reason to wander down from the High Street to the Grassmarket, even though it's less than a 1/4 mile away. There are some hotels, office buildings, convenience stores, a few pubs. Here's what it looks like now:

Anyway, as a professional marketer I file this under the headings: "If it Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It," and "If a Little is Good, More is Awesome..."

The story ran a couple of weeks ago in The Scotsman, under the headline, "Drop into Capital's Grisly New Tourist Trap."

It is one of Scotland's grisliest execution spots, yet its dark history remains unknown to the tens of thousands of tourists who go there every year.

Now, the hundreds of people executed in Edinburgh's Grassmarket will be commemorated under a scheme to refurbish the thoroughfare.

Visitors to the street, in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, will be able to discover how crowds once flocked to watch hangings and beheadings for a variety of offences at the east end of the street.

Historical panels, engraved poems and a layout of cobbles to mark where the gallows once stood will be added to the Covenanters' Memorial, which is being overhauled as part of a multi-million-pound revamp of the area to make it more tourist-friendly.

City council officials have revealed plans to restore the Grassmarket memorial, create a garden area around it and better reflect the history of executions in the area, including those accused of murder, witchcraft, smuggling and child abuse.

The improvements to the Grassmarket, which include extending pavement café areas, relocating parking spaces and creating an events zone, are expected to be completed early next year.

The walls that long surrounded the Covenanters' Memorial have been removed and will make way for picnic benches in an effort to make the east end of the Grassmarket more attractive.

The Grassmarket was actually one of two main sites for public executions, the other being the Mercat Cross, right on the High Street in front of St. Giles Church. St. Giles is one of the primary tourists sites on the Royal Mile (being at one time the church of John Knox, among other things) and usually featuring at least one guy outside in a kilt playing bagpipes for tourists who throw coins in his hat.

What was this grisly history that will encourage tourists to lounge on a picnic bench, slurp a Frappacino from the nearby Starbucks and contemplate the condemned voiding his bladder and bowels as he twitched in the hangman's noose?

The only existing memorial in the Grassmarket is the Covenanters' Memorial, a sorry-looking thing in the middle of the street that marks the spot where 100 Presbyterian lay preachers hanged between 1661 and 1688. The Covenanter's movement was a lay protestant resistance to the Catholic Stuart kings (the conflict that defined so much of Scottish history) and holding underground Presbyterian services, often in barns and such, was punishable by death. Anyway, you can see that the existing memorial is not nearly jazzy enough to draw tourists down from the High Street two blocks away:

Part of the problem with the existing memorial is that it's a somber thing dedicated to Protestant martyrs and as such really only attracts Protestant tourists interested in sites of Protestant martyrdom. The city marketing directors know that in order to drive traffic down the street and get people buying ice cream cones and t-shirts in the Grassmarket they need to broaden the appeal.

Thus, "City council officials have revealed plans to restore the Grassmarket memorial, create a garden area around it and better reflect the history of executions in the area, including those accused of murder, witchcraft, smuggling and child abuse."

Cool.

Actually, there were a lot of nasty people executed in the Grassmarket, not just grim Presbyterians whose last words were Bible quotations. No, the gallows speeches of some of these other unfortunates were probably much more colorful...

- The Grassmarket was the scene of the Porteous riots in 1736. John Porteous, the unpopular and brutal captain of the Town Guard, was torn from the nearby Tollbooth prison and strung up by a mob for ordering his men to open fire into an angry crowd following the earlier hanging of a smuggler.

Or this one:

IN 1751 Jean Waldie and Helen Torrance were sentenced to hang in the Grassmarket for kidnapping and murdering an eight-year-old boy.

Jean had discovered the child, John Dallas, when he was apparently unwell and his parents were away.

She gave him a drink and when he died contacted some surgeon-apprentices who offered two shillings and a dram of whisky in return for the child. But the apprentices dumped the corpse in a lane and Waldie and Torrance were sentenced to die. The pair were thought to have killed far more people.

Their dark deeds and those of the serial killers Burke and Hare resulted in watchtowers and iron fences at public cemeteries, while some coffins were buried under iron bars.

But wait: Incest and Witchcraft!

JEAN Weir was hung in the Grassmarket after she and her brother, Major Thomas Weir, both apparent pillars of Edinburgh society, were found guilty of incest in 1670.

The couple lived at the foot of the West Bow, by the Grassmarket, but Major Weir – captain of the city guard – was taken into custody after neighbours became concerned about his irrational behaviour.

Weir and his sister were put in the Tolbooth jail, where Major Weir voluntarily confessed [ed. note: voluntarily?] to a life of fornication, incest, sodomy and bestiality, and to using witchcraft. He also denounced his sister as a witch.

The authorities sidestepped the issue of witchcraft, but they were declared guilty of incest and foul fornication with others. Major Weir was hung in the Gallowlee, on Leith Walk.

I see t-shirt vendors in the Grassmarket with pithy sayings about incest, bestiality and witchcraft -- I'd like to get some points on that action. They already have t-shirts with pithy sayings about fornication.

And we cannot forget the Grassmarket Resurrection: the case of a woman who came back to life after being hanged there. Personally, I'm thinking that it's more likely that the hanging was performed in a rather sloppy manner...

MAGGIE Dickson, a fish-wife, was charged with concealing that she was pregnant with an illegitimate child after an affair with an innkeeper.

The baby died and she left the corpse on a riverbank. But the body was found and identified and Dickson was hanged in the Grassmarket in 1728.

However, while her body was being taken back to her native Musselburgh, in East Lothian, for burial, noises were heard coming from the coffin – and she was found to be still alive.

She went on to have several more children and enjoyed a long life, running an ale house. A pub named after her is still in the Grassmarket. Had Dickson been hanged in England, she would have been strung up again, as English law dictated that a person must be hanged until dead.

Yeah, it's easy to snark on the blog -- hey, that's what blogs are for and if I didn't try and make the funny how many of you would read this? -- but next time I'm in Edinburgh I'll definitely walk down to the Grassmarket, sit on one of the new benches and partake of the new festive yet macabre features. And if you come with me on a Walk Thru History trip to Scotland we'll take a group photo next to the reconstructed gallows and toss it up on the blog.