Mary King’s Close: The Street Edinburgh Built Over

How the hill shaped Mary King’s Close

The Royal Mile follows the ridge between Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood. Closes and wynds branch from it, carrying people down the slopes on either side. Mary King’s Close belonged to that street pattern. Thinking of it as a tunnel built for secret journeys gives the surviving fabric a purpose it did not originally have.

The archaeological assessment undertaken in 2002 identified several stages: medieval plots gradually filled with buildings, the imposition of the eighteenth-century public building, and the abandonment of parts of the site around 1900. What survives combines structures from different centuries. I would resist treating every doorway as part of one perfectly preserved day in the seventeenth century. The alterations are part of the evidence.

Once you have the slope in mind, the archaeological sequence is much easier to picture. Look for the places where a door or wall belonged to a street that used to be open to the air.

Who was Mary King?

The attraction introduces Mary King as a prominent businesswoman of the 1630s, a widow with four children who traded in fabric and earned money by sewing. I like the attention that gives to a working woman. It widens the history beyond the people who commissioned Edinburgh’s grandest buildings.

There is a qualification, however. Stuart Harris’s study of Edinburgh’s place names, recorded in Historic Environment Scotland’s national record, identifies a Mary King in the 1635 valuation roll as a tenant on the High Street immediately west of the close’s entrance. It leaves the exact process by which the close acquired her name uncertain. Earlier records use Alexander King’s Close; the Mary King form appears in council minutes in 1694.

The trade is the detail I’d keep. Cloth meant work, credit and customers. Her name has lasted longer than most of the evidence for where individual households did those things. You can see what historians have been able to trace in the Historic Environment Scotland record.

What Edinburgh’s plague records tell us

Edinburgh suffered severely during the plague outbreak of 1645. Crowded living conditions helped disease spread, and people with money had greater opportunities to leave. Those who stayed had to continue obtaining food and caring for households while the workforce around them became ill. The National Library of Scotland’s account is useful here because it connects the epidemic with the unequal choices available to different residents.

The often-repeated story that Mary King’s Close was roofed over to imprison its plague victims gets the chronology wrong. It was still open to the sky during the epidemic. The Royal Exchange building project began more than a century later. Quarantine and coercion were real features of plague control, but they do not turn that later construction into a mass burial.

I would spend more time on the people employed to manage the crisis. The attraction’s historical characters include George Rae, a plague doctor, and Walter King, associated with the foul clengers who cleansed infected premises. Their work places the epidemic within the city’s administration. Someone had to organise the labour, find supplies and decide who would pay.

Records from nearby Leith make those practical demands unusually clear. National Records of Scotland’s account of the South Leith kirk-session minutes describes food being supplied to quarantined households, huts built on the Links and workers hired to remove the dead. Heather and gorse were burned to fumigate houses. When a supplier had not been paid for an earlier load, further deliveries became a problem.

The Leith accounts belong to another part of the city. I like having them alongside the story of the close because they name jobs people had to do: feeding households in quarantine, hiring workers and paying for supplies. Those jobs were part of living through 1645.

How the Royal Exchange covered part of the close

The foundation stone of the Royal Exchange was laid in September 1753. John Adam supplied a design, subsequently amended by John Fergus, for a development intended to include an exchange, a customs house, shops, accommodation and coffee houses. It was an ambitious commercial and civic project on an already complicated site.

Parts of Mary King’s Close were overlaid during the work of 1753–61; surviving lower structures were incorporated beneath the new building. Further work, including an extension in 1901, covered more of the close. The building itself gradually became the City Chambers. Its use changed along with the spaces underneath it.

The attraction identifies sawmaker Andrew Chesney as the close’s last resident, leaving in 1897 as expansion approached. His late date is a useful corrective to the idea of a district sealed once and forgotten. Occupation and use continued through changes that a single dramatic account can easily compress.

Stand on the Royal Mile afterwards and look at the City Chambers with the rooms below still in mind. This is where the story stops feeling like a mystery about an entire buried city and starts making sense as a particular Edinburgh building project.

A ghost story people were already telling

I have no objection to a ghost story, provided we know when we are hearing one. An account of apparitions in an occupied house appears in George Sinclair’s Satan’s Invisible World Discovered. In the later printed edition available to read today, a man identified as T. C. moves into the close despite warnings to his servant. The ensuing story includes a disembodied head and a troublesome arm.

A disembodied head is a memorable detail in any story. What we can date is an account of people already telling stories about the place. Someone reading it had a very different way into the close from someone looking up a name in a valuation roll.