The Seventeen Coffins of Arthur's Seat

Arthur's Seat, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh, Scotland

In 1836, five boys hunting rabbits on Arthur's Seat found seventeen tiny coffins, each holding a clothed wooden figure, hidden in a cliff niche. Their purpose has never been explained.

In June 1836, five Edinburgh schoolboys hunting rabbits on the north-east face of Arthur's Seat discovered a small cave entrance closed by three thin slate slabs. Behind it, arranged in three tiers — eight, eight, and one — lay seventeen miniature coffins. Each was about 95 millimetres long, carved from a single piece of pine, lidded with tin tacks, and contained a wooden figurine dressed in stitched cotton clothing. The coffins were taken to the editor of The Scotsman, who described them in detail before allowing the boys to take them home. Eight of the seventeen survive in the National Museum of Scotland; the rest were destroyed by the boys as playthings. No contemporary explanation was ever advanced. The carving is competent but uneven — the work, possibly, of a single shoemaker or leatherworker. The figures' clothes are stitched in stitch patterns used by Edinburgh tailors of the 1830s. The slate slabs sealing the niche had been worked into shape, suggesting deliberate concealment. Three theories have been offered. The first is that the coffins are mock burials for Edinburgh sailors lost at sea, whose bodies could not be recovered. The second is that they are sympathetic-magic effigies — wax-doll style — though no markers identify named victims. The third, advanced by historian Charles Fort and more recently by Edinburgh University, links them to the sixteen victims of the body-snatchers Burke and Hare, whose 1828 trial was held within sight of the Seat, and proposes a seventeenth coffin for the murderers' first un-recorded victim. There is no proof for any of these. The hidden niche has never been re-found. The boys gave only a general description, and the cliff face has shifted in nearly two centuries of weather. The surviving coffins remain on display, their tiny occupants still in their stitched gowns, looking like nothing else in the museum's collection.