THE OLD TOLBOOTH PRISON

THE OLD TOLBOOTH PRISON

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Throughout its long history, the Tolbooth gained a fearsome reputation.

Infamous for its hellish conditions, and the brutal treatment of its prisoners, the Tollboth has earned its reputation.

Judicial torture and executions were commonplace at the Old Tolbooth.

Attached to the west gable, was a protruding platform equipped with a gallows, to allow Edinburgh’s citizens a first rate view of public hangings.

Spikes were fixed into the stone of the jail’s upper reaches, to display the various body parts of those punished with the heaviest penalties.

Included in this, was James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose, whose head was exhibited atop the Old Tolbooth for over ten years from 1650 to 1661.

No exact date is known for the Tolbooth’s construction, though the remnants of the building buried beneath the Royal Mile, are thought to date from as early as 1386.

Its use as a prison, for which the Old Tolbooth would become famous, is first recorded during the 1480s.

In 1561, Mary, Queen of Scots ordered that the crumbling dual-purpose building be demolished and rebuilt.

Following major repairs and remodelling, the Tolbooth persisted, and by 1640 it was used primarily as Edinburgh’s main jail.

In the latter years of the 17th century, prisoners would often be held at the Tolbooth, before being banished to work on the American plantations.

Edinburgh's foremost 18th century historian, Hugo Arnot, wrote the following detailed description of the prison to expose the shocking conditions within.

"When we visited the jail there were confined in it about twenty-nine prisoners, partly debtors, partly delinquents; four or five were women, and there were five boys.

All parts of the jail were kept in a slovenly condition; but the eastern quarter of it, was intolerable.

This consisted of three apartments, each above the other. In what length of time these rooms, and the stairs leading to them, could have collected the quantity of filth which we saw in them, we cannot determine.

The undermost of these apartments was empty. In the second, which is called the iron room, which is destined for those who have received sentence of death, there were three boys: one of them might have been about fourteen, the others about twelve years of age.

They had been confined about three weeks for thievish practices.

From this, we went to the apartment above, where were two miserable boys, not twelve years of age.

But there we had no leisure for observation; for, no sooner was the door opened, than such an insufferable stench assailed us, from the stagnant and putrid air of the room, as, notwithstanding our precautions, utterly to overpower us".

In 1817 the ageing and dilapidated Old Tolbooth, along with the adjoining block of residential buildings known as ‘the Luckenbooths’, was demolished and replaced by the newly-built Calton Jail as the city’s main correction facility.

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https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/.../lost-edinburgh...

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Hall of the Old Tolbooth, c. 1795, by William Clark.