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Old and New Edinburgh Vol. V

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156 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Leith Walk. hall within thirty years of the time when Steele and Addison were writing in the Specfatorf The 10th of October, 1681, saw five unfortunate victims of misrule, named Garnock, Foreman, Russel, Ferrie, and Stewart, executed at the Gallow Lee, where their bodies were buried, while their heads were placed on the Cowgate Port. Some of their friends came in the night, and reverently lifting the remains, re-interred them in the West Churchyard They had the courage also to take half of the linen over them, and stufft the coffin with shavings.? Many urged that the latter should be borne through all the chief thoroughfares ; but PatricK Walker adds that instead, we went out by. the back of the [city] wall, in at the Bristo Port, and turned up to the churchyard [Greyfrairs], where they were interred close to the Martyrs? tomb, with the greatest multitude of people, old and young, men and women, ministers and others, that I ever saw together.? JOPPA PANS, down the heads for the same purpose, but being scared they were obliged to enclose them in a box, which they buried in a garden at Lauriston. There they lay till the 7th of October, 1726, a period of forty-five years, when a Mr. Shaw, proprietor of the garden, had them exhumed. The resurrection of the ghastly relics of the Covenanting times made a great excitement in Edinburgh. They were rolled in four yards of fine linen and placed in a coffin. ?( Being young men, their teeth all remained,? says Patrick Walker (the author of ?? Biographia Presbyteriana ?). ? All were witness to the holes in each of their heads which the hangman broke with his hammer ; and according to the bigness of their skulls we laid their jaws to them, drew the other On the 10th of January, 1752, there was taken from the Tolbooth, hanged at the Gallow Lee, and gibbeted there, a man named Norman ROSS, whose remains were long a source of disgust and dismay to all wayfarers on the Walk. His crime was the assassination of Lady Baillie, a sister of Home the Laud of Wedderburn. A relation of this murder is given in a work entitled ?Memoirs of an Anstocrat,? published in 1838, by the brother of a claimant for the Earldom of Marchmont, a book eventually suppressed The lady in question married Ninian Home, a dominie, but by failure of her brothers ultimately became heiress, and the dominie died before her. Norman Ross was her footman, and secreted
Volume 5 Page 156
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