Stirling's Old Town Cemetery

The jewel within Stirling's crown!

A version of this post was published in the Stirling Observer

I was thinking about the Top o’The Town Cemetery this week. The place is jumping with tourists but not as many as you might think….c 60-70000 people visit the wonderful Church of the Holy Rude…..but c 600,000 visit the castle!

This has always puzzled me and so in response I started to organise volunteers (they do all the hard work) to give tours of the cemetery. As you all know the cemetery is wonderful and great to wonder around looking angels, cherubs and green men but you get so much more if you know a little about whose grave your looking at and what their story is.

The picture here is of the foundation of the Watch House built to deter grave robbers after 1822 when the corpse of Mary Witherspoon was stolen by the grave digger James McNab for illegal dissection at the request of a medical student, John Forrest. There was a bit of a panic and the Watch House was built on existing burial plots using older grave stones. The idea was for relatives or guards to stay in the house for a few nights until the body rotted and was no good for dissection. Grave robbing stopped being an issue after 1832 when the Anatomy Act was passed regulating the supply of bodies of criminals to medical students. The Watch House along with the walls of the old cemetery and most of the wall monuments were demolished in 1857 when the Valley Cemetery was built. The idea being to integrate the old and the new and I think they did a wonderful job. Certainly Wordsworth said he knew of no more pleasant a spot.

So if you’re a Stirling resident why not pop up and if your not a local why not come for a wee visit…there really is so much to see. Stirling is perhaps the most important place in Scottish history and at no other place in Europe is so much crammed into so small place…..you can see a Celtic destroyed by fire, one of Europe’s finest renaissance palaces, Scotland’s best preserved city walls and Scotland 2nd most important battlefield all within a 15 minute walk!