Bodies everywhere

I've had a morbid revelation. Dig just about anywhere around Edinburgh, and you'll probably find a body or three. I've been listening to archaeologists talk about recent digs around the city and the Lothians, and it's eye-opening.

Digs for the tram works turned up 10 burials at the corner of London Road and Elm Row, near the site of a medieval monastery that was converted into a lepers' hospital in 1591. Two were babies; the others men and women all less than about 35 years old, and all of whom had apparently lived lives of poverty and hard manual labour since childhood.

Further down the hill on Constitution Street, more tram works turned up the burials of a staggering 378 people below a stretch of road just 100m long. They were probably buried in the grounds of South Leith Parish Church between about 1500 and 1800; and there are almost certainly hundreds more buried nearby tenement flats. Most died in late childhood or as young to middle aged adults, and like the London Road burials, most had poor, iron-deficient diets, dominated by cheap carbohydrates like bread and porridge.

Out at Musselburgh a dig at a new NHS site has unearthed, among many other things, more than 10 Roman skeletons, some who had their heads chopped after death, and the skulls buried with them, lying next to their hand, by their feet or between their legs. Maybe they were gladiators, like similar burials found in York? Maybe they were from local British tribes who practised headless burial rituals? As well as the human burials there's also a horse buried in a pit below a funeral pyre along with the cremated remains of a human. And all this below a new health centre and Tescos.

I could go on and on and on. The bodies discovered during renovation of the quad at Old College which could be linked to the murders of Darnley (2nd husband of Mary Queen of Scots) - as well as the piles of 18th century lab equipment and experiments buried below the remains of a demolished university building, with the brightly coloured remains of chemicals like arsenic, cobalt and mercury oxides still in their broken dishes. Or the unmarked medieval remains of babies found close to the walls of a churchyard in the Borders, who were probably unbaptised and buried secretly in hallowed ground at night.

I shouldn't be so surprised that with all the people who've lived before us, the earthly remains of quite a few of them must still be hanging around. I'll be going to be going around town with new eyes, wondering just who has been lain to rest below my feet.