MUSCHAT?S CAIRN. 311 Arthur?r Seat.]
terrible schemes occupied Nichol. Muschat, his
brother, and his sister-in-law, together with Burnbank,
? in the Christian city of Edinburgh, during a
course of many months, without any one, to appearance,
ever feeling the slightest compunction towards
the poor weman, though it is admitted she
loved her husband, and no real fault on her side
has ever been insinuated.?
At length it would seem that Nicol, infatuated
and lured by evil fate, at the suggestion of ?? the
devil, that cunning adversary ?-as his confession
has it-borrowed a knife, scarcely knowing for
what purpose, and, inviting his unsuspecting wife to
walk with him as far as
Duddingston one night,
cut her throat near
the line of trees that
marked the Duke?s
Walk. He then rushed
in a demented state to
tell his brother what
he had done, and thereafter
sank into a mood
of mind that made all
seem blank to him.
Next morning the unfortunate
victim was
found ?with her throat
cut to the bone,? and
many other wounds received
in her dying
struggle.
In the favourite old
Edinburgh religious
by a cairn near the east gate and close to the north
wall. ?The original cairn is said to have been
several paces farther west than the present one,
the stones of which were taken dut of the old wall
whenit was pulled down to give place to the new
gate that was constructed previous to the late royal
visit ?-that of George IV.
In 1820 the pathway round Salisbury Craigs was
formed, and named the ? Radical Road ? from ?the
, circumstance of the destitute and discontented
west-country weavers being employed on its construction
under a committee of gentlemen. At
that time it was proposed to ?sow the rocks with
wall-flowers and other
>I? AlAKGAKET?S WELI..
tract, which narrates
the murderous story, in telling where he went
before doing the deed, he says that he passed
?? through the Tidies,? at the end of a lane which
was near the Meadows. The entrance to the Park,
near the Gibbet Fall, was long known as ?the
Tirliea,? implying a sort of stile.
Nicol Muschat was tried, and confessed all. He
was hanged, on the 6th of the ensuing January in
the Grassmarket, while his associate Burnbank was
declared infamous, and banished ; and the people,
to mark their horror of the event, in the old
Scottish fashion raised a cairn on the spot where
the murder was perpetrated, and it has ever since
been a well-remembered locality.
The first cairn was removed during the formation
of a new footpath through the park, suggested by
Lord Adam Gordon, who was resident at Holyrood
House in 1789, when Commander of the
Forces in Scotland; but from a passage in the
WeekOJournal we find that it was restored in 1823
odoriferous and flowering
plants.? It was also
suggested ? to plant
the cliffs above the
walk with the rarest
heaths from the Cape
of Good Hope and
other foreign parts.?
( Weekfiyuumal, XXIV.)
The papers of this
time teem with bitter
complaints against the
Earl of Haddington,
who, as a keeper of
the Royal Park, by an
abuse of his prercgative,
was quarrying away
the craigs, and selling
the stone to pave the
streets of London; and
the immense gaps in
their south-western face still remain as proofs of
his selfish and unpatriotic rapacity.
As a last remnant of the worship of Baal, or
Fire, we may mention the yearly custom that still
exists of a May-day observance, in the young of the
female sex particularly, ascending Arthur?s Seat on
Beltane morning at sunrise. ?? On a fine May morning,?
says the ? Book of Days,? ? the appearance
of so many gay groups perambulating the hill sides
and the intermediate valleys, searching for dew, and
rousing the echoes with their harmless mirth, has
an indescribably cheerful effect.? Many old citizens
adhered to this custom with wonderful tenacity,
and among the last octogenarians who did so we
may mention Dr. Andrew Duncan of Adam Square,
the founder of the Morningside Asylum, who paid
his last annual visit to the hill top on hlayday, 1S26~
in his eighty-second year, two years before his death ;
and James Burnet, the last captain of the old Town
Guard, a man who weighed nindeen stone, ascended
