Rosenkrantz Discovery Grant Group Blog: Historic Underground Tour

I was lucky enough to go on an "Historic Underground Tour" of Edinburgh's Blair Street vaults. During the hour-long tour, our group was led to a site right off of the Royal Mile, which is an aptly named street that runs a mile across the center of Edinburgh. The street is raised due to glacial movement during a past ice age. Because of these natural forces, the outer sides of the Royal Mile run downwards from its higher altitude, and the underground vaults are located along one of these sites known as the South Bridge. The vaults were built in the eighteenth-century, but they were rediscovered recently in the 1980s.

The vaults were fascinating for a number of reasons. The huge variety of activities that took place underground included an secret oyster restaurant frequented by Enlightenment thinkers and University of Edinburgh students, leather production, alcohol fermentation, and the vaults even housed a couple of homeless families. The illicit underground activity that I found most fascinating, however, was the storage of bodies that were dug up by body snatchers in order to be used as medical cadavers. The Edinburgh Medical School needed cadavers for their medical students to practice on, and Edinburgh criminals would provide the faculty with cadavers in exchange for payment.

The two most infamous body snatchers were William Burke and William Hare, who were active in the nineteenth-century. Burke and Hare took body snatching one step further, however, and actually committed murders in order to sell human bodies to the Edinburgh Medical School. Because the body snatchers were unable to walk their bodies over to the Medical School as quickly as they'd like, they often stored them in the underground vaults. During the tour, we saw these storage units and the door that led to an underground short cut to the Medical School campus. Although the experience of being down in the dark vaults was rather chilling, it was super interesting to actually see and feel the space in which such a wide range of activities (both legal and not) took place underground centuries ago.