The Miniature Coffins of Arthur’s Seat
At the
National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh are a set of eight miniature coffins
carved in wood and decorated with tinned iron. Each coffin contains a tiny
wooden figure, with a painted face and dressed in clothes that had been
stitched and glued around them. Since their discovery in a cave by a group of
young lads one June afternoon in 1836, the miniature figurines have been a
source of much fascination and mystery.
The
boys had been out all day hunting for rabbits on the slopes of a rocky peak
known as Arthur’s Seat, when their attention was drawn towards a small cave
hidden behind a slab of slate. After pulling back the slab of stone, the boys
found seventeen little coffins inside, each barely 4 inches long, arranged in
three tiers—two rows of eight, and a solitary coffin at the top.
The
discovery was important enough to find a place in the July 16th edition of The Scotsman, year 1836. The paper
reported:
Each
of the coffins contained a miniature figure of the human form cut out in wood,
the faces in particular being pretty well executed. They were dressed from head
to foot in cotton clothes, and decently "laid out" with a mimic
representation of all funeral trappings which usually form the last habiliments
of the dead. The coffins art about three or four inches in length, regularly
shaped, and cut out from a single piece of wood, with the exception of the
lids, which are nailed down with wire sprigs or common brass pins. The lids and
sides of each art profusely studded with ornaments formed of small pieces of
tin, and inserted in the wood with great cart and regularity.
Stranger
still were the signs that seemed to imply that the coffins were deposited over
a considerable period of time, “indicated by the rotten and decoyed state of
the first tier of coffins and their wooden mummies.” The early coffins had the
wrapping cloth, in some instances, “entirely mouldered away, while others show
various degree of decomposition”, while the coffin placed last was “as clean
and fresh as if only a few days had elapsed since their entombment.”
The
article concluded—but with some hesitation—that the coffins were the misdoings
of “some of the weird sisters hovering about Mushat’s Cairn or the Windy Gowl,
who retain their ancient power to work the spells of death by entombing the
likenesses of those they wish to destroy.”
Indeed,
witchery was the most immediate assumption. Scotland, and Edinburgh in
particular, have a dark history of witch trails. Between 4,000 to 6,000
“witches” were executed in Scotland between the 16th and 18th centuries, 300 of
which were burned at the Edinburg Castle—more than anywhere else in Scotland.
Today, there is a memorial fountain at the Castle, known as the Witches’ Well,
commemorating all the murdered women.
Before
long other newspapers picked up the story, concluding with their own
interpretation of the coffins. The Edinburgh
Evening Post mused whether the coffins might be “an ancient custom
which prevailed in Saxony, of burying in effigy departed friends who had died
in a distant land.” The Caledonian Mercury
concurred adding that some sailors also instruct their wives on parting to give
them 'Christian burial' in an effigy if they happened to be lost at sea.
In the
1990s, a new theory emerged linking the seventeen figures to the seventeen
victims of the notorious Edinburgh serial killers Burke and Hare, who in the
late 1820s went on a killing spree to supply cadavers to medical practitioners.
It was proposed that the tiny figures are tributes to the victims, despite the
fact that the pair’s victims were mostly women while all the wooden bodies were
dressed in men’s clothing.
William
Hare and William Burke.
Dr.
Allen Simpson and Professor Samuel Menefee, of the University of Edinburgh and
the University of Virginia, respectively, carried out a detailed study of the
figures in 1994, and have suggested that the toys were not carved for the
purpose of burial but were adapted from a set of wooden toy soldiers
manufactured around the 1790s, but not re-clothed or buried in the cave until
the 1830s. The conclusion was based on the findings that some of the dolls had
their arms removed, apparently to allow the figures to fit into its coffin, and
markings on their lower bodies that seem to indicate the figures were
originally made to stand upright. Their eyes were also painted open, making it
unlikely they were originally designed as corpses.
Of the
seventeen original coffins, only eight survived and are at Edinburgh’s National
Museum of Scotland. The rest, as The
Scotsman of July 16, 1836, reported, were “either badly damaged or
lost altogether as the decrepit-looking cache provided convenient fodder for
the boys to pelt one another with.”
The
landscape around Arthur’s Seat, whose peak can be seen on the right.
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