The story
As you stand here on the edge of Lothian Road, where the rush of Edinburgh’s modern traffic meets the ancient, hallowed ground of the West End, take a moment to look down into the hollow of St Cuthbert’s Churchyard. Spread out beneath the towering basalt cliffs of Edinburgh Castle, this site has been a place of rest for over a thousand years. But look closely toward the western boundary, and you will see a small, two-story stone tower with narrow windows.
This is the Watchtower, built in 1827, and it stands as a grim monument to a time when the dead were not allowed to rest in peace. In the early 19th century, Edinburgh was the world’s leading center for medical science. The city’s surgeons were pioneers, but their success relied on a steady supply of human bodies for dissection.
Under the law, only the corpses of executed criminals were permitted for study, but as the medical schools grew, the supply ran dry. This created a lucrative, illicit market for cadavers, and soon, a new and terrifying profession emerged: the Resurrection Men. Grave robbing became a plague.
Professional body-snatchers would wait for a fresh burial, slip into the churchyard under the cover of darkness, and use specialized tools to whisk the body away to the back doors of anatomy theaters before the sun rose. The fear gripped the city. Families would stay by the graves of their loved ones for weeks, braving the Scottish rain and wind until decomposition rendered the body useless to the surgeons.
The watchtower you see before you was the community’s desperate response. It was built specifically to house armed guards who would patrol these paths at night. From those narrow windows, guards watched for the glint of a shovel or the movement of a dark cloak.
They were equipped with lanterns and bells to sound the alarm. If you look around at some of the older graves nearby, you might even spot heavy iron grates or cages, known as mortsafes, bolted over the stone. These were the ultimate locks for the grave.
The panic reached its fever pitch with the trial of William Burke and William Hare. While they were not grave robbers themselves—they realized it was easier to simply create corpses through murder than to dig them up—their crimes turned Edinburgh into a city of paranoia. Standing here today, the watchtower reminds us of that dark chapter where the boundary between life and death was guarded by stone, iron, and a loaded musket.
As you continue your walk, notice how the tower still keeps its silent vigil, a lonely protector of the secrets buried beneath your feet.