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