Perthshire’s grisly past will be brought to life next month.
Body snatchers, grave robbers and other morbid mysteries will be examined as part of the annual Doors Open Day. As well as tours of graveyards and historic mort houses, the Perth bodysnatching tour will haunt the Fair City streets.
Popular Edinburgh history and ghost walk firm Mercat Tours will help unearth the dark secrets of bodysnatching in Perth, with a costumed guide describing traditions of death and burial, strange tales and beliefs and the rise of the ”resurrection men”.
The tour will begin at the historic Greyfriars churchyard before winding its way to Kinnoull graveyard where it will be revealed why Perth was the perfect place for the bodysnatching trade in centuries past and how the ghouls who practiced it have left a surprising legacy today.
Doors Open Day is a nationwide Historic Scotland event being run in Perth and Kinross by Perth and Kinross Heritage Trust. Project officer Fiona Fisher said: ”The bodysnatcher tour is a new, fun event which should appeal to a slightly new, younger audience.”
Frances Mann, general manager of Mercat Tours, said: ”The tales of bodysnatching are great, the locations are fantastically atmospheric and we are really happy to have an opportunity to help the trust bring history to life for locals and visitors alike.”
The resurrectionists were criminals who dug up fresh corpses across Scotland to sell to anatomy schools, which desperately needed fresh corpses for students but were limited to using only executed criminals for their studies.
Perthshire was particularly targeted due to its central location between Aberdeen, St Andrews, Edinburgh and Glasgow and there are 17th century accounts of the graveyard at Kinnoull being raided and the bodies transported across the Tay to a hospital in Atholl House. Such was the extent of the gruesome problem, churches and wealthy families across the county built mort houses, mausoleums, vaults and crypts to store bodies.
Watch houses were made to guard recent burials at Coupar Angus, Kinnaird and Kinfauns and a watch rota from Greyfriars churchyard in Perth still exists which details how the locals tried to keep the desperate villains at bay.
The issue was brought to a head by the infamous Burke and Hare murderers rather than resurrectionists and the 1832 Anatomy Act, which allowed corpses to be procured with prior consent and unclaimed bodies from work houses to create a steady supply for the students.
The heritage trust is restoring sites as part of its Historic Churchyards project and these are among the 48 properties that can be seen across Perth and Kinross during Doors Open Day, on September 22 and 23.
At Collace, Jackie Hay and Elizabeth Miller will be leading guided walks of the 19th century churchyard which includes the newly restored Mort house and the church will also be open to the public.
Coupar Angus Regeneration Trust has organised a variety of events including the opening of the Abbey Church, which sits on the site of the Cistercian Abbey of 1164 and there will be a display about the project inside the church. However, its mausoleum and watch house will not be open this year as conservation work is ongoing.
In Meigle, sculptured stones expert, Lynda McGuigan will lead tours of the graveyard where nearly 30 stones now in the Historic Scotland museum next door were found more than 150 years ago.
The bodysnatcher tours are free but booking is required. Visit www.pkht.org.uk
Photo Mercat Tours