A heart of darkness

DO BUILDINGS leave ghosts when they die? If one is minded to believe that people can leave spectres of themselves when they quit this mortal coil, why not buildings – or at least a building which was for centuries such a palpably sinister presence in the Edinburgh townscape as the Old Tolbooth?

Variously parliament and council chamber, tax office and court of session, but most infamously the town jail until its demolition in 1817, the Tolbooth was a massive, turreted stone hulk which loomed over the middle of the High Street beside St Giles' Cathedral. It was a byword for the evocative Scots legal term squalor carceris, literally "dirty prison" – or, as author Douglas Skelton describes it in his new book about the long-vanished building, "a fetid, often plague-ridden hellhole".

Dubbed the "Heart of Midlothian" by Sir Walter Scott in his great novel of the same title, the Tolbooth dated in its original form back to the 14th century (some foundation remnants were uncovered during High Street improvement works in 2006). Its hoary stone bulk remained a grim symbol of justice, and not infrequently injustice, until its demolition in 1817 – the same year that the newly founded Scotsman opened its first office at 347 High Street, just a stone's throw away from the jail.

The grim, fortified building may now have vanished from sight – except its massive timber door and iron lock, which Scott, having enshrined the place in Scottish literature, purloined for his extravagant Tweedside home, Abbotsford – but it remains so deeply embedded in folk memory that even today, you'll see locals spitting into the heart-shaped pattern of cobbles that marks its former location.

It was the spitting that brought the attention of journalist and author Douglas Skelton to the vanished prison. "A friend had been in Edinburgh and had seen people spitting on the cobbles and he asked me why. Being a Weegie, I had no idea, to be honest, but I discovered it was the site of the Old Tolbooth." Skelton, who is the editor of the Cumnock Chronicle, has written several "true crime" books, as well as a recent biography of "Indian Peter" Williamson, the 18th-century adventurer and coffeehouse owner who lived opposite the Tolbooth. "The Tolbooth kept cropping up," he explains.

Now Skelton has written Dark Heart: Tales from Edinburgh's Town Jail. As far as he knows, no-one else has devoted a book to the grim old prison, although its massive, turreted bulk haunts virtually any account you read of old Edinburgh, the heads and other body parts of those adjudged of treason and other offences mouldering on spikes above the grim gates.

Robert Chambers, the 19th century publisher and chronicler of old Edinburgh, recalled the Tolbooth, not long after its demolition, as "antique in form, gloomy and haggard in aspect", adding that: "There was something about the Old Tolbooth which would have enabled a blindfolded person led into it to say that it was jail… it had poverty's own smell – the odour of human misery".

Robert Louis Stevenson later observed: "This was the site of the Tolbooth, the Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and namefather to a noble book. The walls are now down in the dust; there is no more squalor carceris for merry debtors; no more cage for the old, acknowledged prison-breaker; but the sun and wind play freely over the foundations of the jail."

But what sort of place could still prompt people to spit at its memory, even after it has been gone these past two centuries? Skelton, having trawled through various sources, including the warding, liberation and relief books of the old prison, provides plenty of reasons why, from unjust incarcerations to murder trials, Covenanter martyrdoms to viciously sadistic witch-hunts. In its dank confines, poor and unlamented wretches and the great and good alike were left to languish, swing from the gallows outside, or face even more appalling deaths by being hung, drawn and quartered.

Going through these bound and yellowed volumes in the National Archives of Scotland gave Skelton a rare point of contact with the vanished prison. He was intrigued to find that some names that should have been recorded were missing, and some of the volumes had pages cut out of them, prompting him to wonder whether the authorities had been trying to cover up wrongful or unpopular sentences.

"It's when you get into the actual records, where you can still have some sort of physical contact with the place, through these warding and liberation books," he explains. "That's where the jailers made their notes, and you can read wee computations where they were working out costs for this, that and the other, and how many prisoners there were and everything else. It just gives you a wee thrill, to touch something that was actually there."

Situated strategically beside the town's principal kirk and market place, the Tolbooth did occasional time as royal council chamber.

It is as a prison, however, that it earned its reputation as the dark heart of the city. So you have Covenanters making heroic martyr's speeches on the scaffold – men such as the young preacher Hugh McKail, brutally tortured in the Tolbooth following his arrest in 1666. Even after his leg had been shattered by the device known as "the boot", he had enough spirit to declare that "Fear of my neck makes me forget my leg", adding: "I am not so cumbered about dying as I have often been about preaching a sermon."

Sixteen years before, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, who had originally signed the National Covenant but eventually turned against what he saw as the Covenanters' extremism and self-interest, spent his last days in the prison. There he was constantly harangued by Covenanting zealots, before taken finally to the Mercat Cross and hung on a gallows 30ft high for three hours before being dismembered, his head joining the grisly collection on the Tolbooth gate and his limbs distributed about the kingdom. His nemesis, the Covenanting Duke of Argyll, followed a similar route after the restoration of Charles II, although he was beheaded.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the witch-hunting mania reached a peak during the reign of "Jamie the Saxt" – James VI of Scotland and I of England – and the Tolbooth witnessed the unbelievably sadistic interrogation under torture of women – and sometimes men – accused of witchcraft on the slightest pretext.

The heartless piety of the leaders of the reformed kirk who presided over this misogynist epidemic would make one despair of humanity, Skelton agrees. "I'm a cynic anyway, but the things that supposedly upright people were capable of…"

The prison also housed some of Edinburgh's most infamous characters , including the saturnine Major Weir, the incestuous warlock of the West Bow, who was burned to death at the Gallowlee, off Leith Walk, along with his staff, which was held to have supernatural powers. His hapless sister was hanged in the Grassmarket.

Then there was Deacon Brodie, Edinburgh's municipal icon of sinister dualism – who, according to Skelton and contrary to popular folklore, was not hung on a gibbet of his own design, although he may have been present at the council meeting which approved its adoption.

When Walter Scott wrote arguably his greatest novel, Heart of Midlothian, he based his heroine, Jeannie Deans, on the real-life character of Helen Walker, who walked the 300 miles from Dumfriess-shire to London and secured a Royal Pardon for her sister, Tibbie, who was awaiting the death sentence (though not in the Tolbooth) for child murder. Scott's novel, which was published just two years after the demolition of the prison, opens with a spectacular evocation of the Porteous Riots in 1736, when John Porteous, an unpopular captain of the town guard, ordered his men to open fire into an angry crowd following the hanging of a smuggler. He was subsequently sentenced to die on the Grassmarket gibbet, but Queen Caroline granted him a six-week reprieve. The belligerent Edinburgh mob wasn't having it and broke into the Tollbooth, dragged the captain out and hanged him from a dyers' shop pole in the Grassmarket.

In records about the radical Glasgow advocate lawyer, Thomas Muir, who spent time in the Tolbooth before being tried for sedition – he and the Friends of the People organisation had the temerity to call for parliamentary reform – and banished to Botany Bay, Skelton also found in a warding book for 14 January, 1794, an entry concerning one of Muir's fellow radical activists, Maurice Margarot. The report described him as "merchant in Marybone, London and No 10 High Street, presently or lately residing at the Black Bull Inn at the head of Leith walk. Found guilty of sedition and sentenced to be transported beyond the seas…"

"I thought, 'Right, who is this Margarot?' and started doing some digging and got some more. That was a real eye-opener to me, and that's a terrible admission to make, because we should all know about these people. They certainly didn't teach it when I was at school."

Skelton, now 51, feels there should be more of a memorial to the Old Tolbooth and its unhappy internees than there is at present. One is tempted to suggest a copious spittoon – but, please, no heads on spikes.

Dark Heart: Tales From Edinburgh's Town Jail, by Douglas Skelton, is published by Mainstream, priced 7.99.

HORROR ON THE HIGH ST

James Graham

THE first Marquis of Montrose, Graham was executed at the Tolbooth on 21 May, 1650. Eyewitnesses recorded the dignity and grace of his bearing, and the generosity of his last words: "I leave my soul to God, my service to my prince, my goodwill to my friends, my love and charity to you all."

John Porteous

ON 7 September, 1736, Captain Porteous was awaiting execution after having opened fire on an Edinburgh crowd. An impatient mob broke into the Tolbooth and dragged him from his cell to the Grassmarket. He was strung up with rope from a local draper's shop, let down, beaten and hanged again.

Deacon Brodie

BY DAY, a respectable businessman and burgh councillor – at night a burglar and thief. He was hanged at the Tolbooth on 1 October, 1788. It is often said he was hung on a gallows of his own design, but Skelton says this is not true – although the Deacon may have been at the meeting which approved its adoption.

Archibald Campbell

A leading Covenanter, the 8th Earl of Argyll and chief of Clan Campbell was sentenced to death after the restoration of Charles II for his collaboration with Cromwell. He was beheaded on 27 May, 1661 – before the death warrant had even been signed by the king. His head was placed on the same spike at the west end of the Tolbooth as that of his arch-enemy, Montrose.