Canongate Kirkyard, Edinburgh

Canongate Kirkyard, Edinburgh

Visited September 2016

The kirkyard of the Canongate Kirk on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh contains burials from the 18th century onwards, in a variety of states of repair. The church itself is still in use, and there are modern memorials in the kirkyard as well as ancient. 

It’s a neatly laid out kirkyard, on the Holyrood rather than Castle part of the Royal Mile, and there weren’t too many tourists when I visited. There are large monuments around the walls and towards the back, and smaller stones in the middle. A few early stones bear memento mori such as skulls, but they’re few and far between.

Two memorials of note are the memorial to the Coachdrivers of the Canongate, whose stone shows a coach and horses, and the stone to poet Robert Fergusson, who was the inspiration for Robert Burns.