Mystery Of The Miniature Coffins
... SNIP ...[Original headlines: Coffins that came back from grave]
The strangeness of the case of the Arthur's Seat Coffins resides in its details, in the way it shines light on to how the ritualistic can often permeate the everyday.
In July 1836, five boys were escaping the clamour of the old town of Edinburgh one afternoon by hunting for rabbits on Arthur's Seat, at the eastern edge of the city centre. The hillside is dotted with caves and hollows. A boy strayed into one. He found a heap of slates, artfully arranged, and beneath it a baffling revelation: 17 miniature coffins, each four inches long, each containing a small wooden figurine in custom-made clothes.
There were two tiers of eight coffins, and a third tier featuring only one. The lower tiers were somewhat decayed, indicating that the coffins might have been placed there singly over various intervals of time. Each figure had a carved face, had boots painted on in black and was wrapped in coloured cloth.
"One was in a green and white, striped shroud," says author Ian Rankin. "I like to think it was a tribute to an early Hibs supporter."
The find excited some querulous coverage in the newspapers, even being mentioned in The Times.
The Scottish Presbyterian imagination was at its most fecund in this era, particularly exercised by matters of death and resurrection, issues which the Arthur's Seat Coffins seemed to address in a strangely opaque way.
The Scotsman was singularly affronted, describing the tomb as a "Satanic spellmanufactory" and postulating that a cabal of "weird sisters", straight from the pages of Macbeth, had "worked these spells of death by entombing the likenesses of those they wish to destroy". (These days, The Scotsman would instead run a three-page feature on how miniature coffins were the season's must-have accessory for professional women in their 20s).
The coffins fell into the hands of a private collector, and were then given in 1901 to the Museum of Scotland, where they have remained. In the interim, nine have crumbled to dust. Three of those that remain went on display recently at the Royal Museum as part of the Heaven and Hell exhibition.
"They're a subject of perennial fascination," says Dr Alison Sheridan, the exhibition's lead curator. "It's a shame that so many are now lost, but a number were left on the cave floor, soaked in mud. Only the ones that were stored higher up have survived."
These variations in condition explain why investigators originally believed the coffins had been interred one at a time; in fact, they were all laid at the same point, a fact that was eventually to help formulate a plausible explanation for their existence.
Readers of Rankin's successful series of Inspector Rebus crime novels will know how the author has paid homage to the notion of a hidden Edinburgh, a city that obscures its dark past beneath a veneer of nervous gentility. But Rankin was only vaguely aware of the Arthur's Seat Coffins when he arrived at the Museum of Scotland last year to film a documentary on devolution for French television.
He says: "This curator pulled me aside and said, 'Here, you like this kind of stuff,' and he showed me the coffins. I was just knocked out by them, by the idea that these small objects could generate so much mystery for so long. It was something that needed some kind of explanation, so the book just started writing itself."
Later the novelist scoured Arthur's Seat to try to find the cave in which the figures were found, to no avail. He also discounted several of the theories advanced to explain the figures. Owen Dudley Edwards, the Edinburgh academic, has ventured the coffins were props in a travelling stage show, buried on the hill as part of a prank. "Unlikely," says Rankin. "They're too small to be seen from the stalls."
Another popular rationalisation was that the figures were carried by sailors to ward off misfortune, then buried at the conclusion of a successful assignment. "They were evidently made with much care and skill," says Rankin. "Sailors would have had those whittling skills. But I don't think Victorian sailors had that kind of lateral thinking." Rumours of a connection to witchcraft also persist.
In The Falls, to be published next March, Rebus alights on the Arthur's Seat conundrum when a glamorous young Edinburgh University student named Flip, the daughter of a prominent private banker, goes missing from a fictional east Lothian village. The sole clue is a miniature coffin left at the site of her abduction. When the case begins to look like one of murder, the policeman must delve deeper into one of the most puzzling nooks of Edinburgh's history. Fans of the habitually grim copper will be gratified to hear Rebus nurtures a romance with a museum curator as he unpicks this mingling of past and present.
"It's really a book about missing victims," says Rankin. "I'm putting forward the argument that the coffins in the book, like the coffins on Arthur's Seat, represent people who will never be found. Maybe the book will encourage some anthropologist to look into the Arthur's Seat mystery and solve it once and for all. It would be nice to get some closure."
As far as the Museum of Scotland is concerned, however, some kind of closure was achieved recently. Last year, the museum commissioned researcher Dr Allen Simpson and Dr Sam Menefee of the University of Virginia to examine the figures and formulate a solution. They concluded the most likely explanation was that they had been fashioned by a shoemaker acquaintance of the grave robbers Burke and Hare.
Simpson argues that each coffin was shaped from a single piece of wood using a shoemaker's knife and that the brass fittings were adapted from shoe buckles. The idea was to provide a surrogate burial for those who had been disinterred and dissected by anatomists. The number of coffins matched the number of corpses Burke and Hare [body snatchers] provided.
"The thinking then was you couldn't be resurrected if you'd been dissected," says Sheridan. "This friend of Burke and Hare's obviously decided to give the victims some vestige of Christian treatment."
The Burke and Hare theory is the one Rankin endorses in his novel, although Sheridan seems slightly peeved that the writer arrived at his conclusion without acknowledging the researches of Simpson and Menefee. "I hope the book points out it was Allen Simpson who pulled all this together," she says.
The unexplained, however, has a habit of remaining that way, and plausible solutions merely reflect the mind-sets of the eras that spawned them. It is a safe bet that one day a different, and equally plausible, explanation for the Arthur's Seat Coffins will be advanced. Whatever it is, it will sound convincing only if it takes into account the slightly shameful, profit-driven thread that has always run through the strange and sinister histories of our glorious capital.
• Story originally published by •
The Sunday Times / London | By Allan Brown - September 17 2000
