Greyfriars Kirk

The jagged, crow-stepped gables of Greyfriars Kirk rise above a graveyard packed so tightly with stone that the earth seems made of headstones. Opened in sixteen twenty, this building served as the first church constructed in Edinburgh after the Scottish Reformation. Inside these walls, in sixteen thirty-eight, thousands of Scots signed the National Covenant, a defiant document that pledged to protect their Presbyterian faith. The ink dried, but the ensuing conflict against the King spilled out into the surrounding burial ground.