Gilmerton Cove - Masons and Templars and Ghosts, Oh My!

[AhabsOtherLeg]

... cool secret masonic underground chambers around... the King Eddy or Royal York

I can see why both those places would be considered significant by Freemasons, especialy since the names would've been chosen before the buildings began construction.

Post up what you find!

King Eddy: http://www.grandlodgescotland.com/index ... Itemid=158

Royal York: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York_Rite

Thinking about what Mac said, that the Gilmerton Cove "table" and "punch bowl" resemble an operating table, and considering the seating all around it (and the "bed", which also has a large notch in it for some reason) I remembered the notorious case of Burke and Hare, the early proto-serial killers who "operated" in Edinburgh some time after George Patterson's day.

The Burke and Hare murders (nickname West Port murders) were serial murders perpetrated in Edinburgh, Scotland, from November 1827 to October 31, 1828. The killings were attributed to Irish immigrants William Burke and William Hare, who sold the corpses of their 17 victims to provide material for dissection. Their purchaser was Doctor Robert Knox, a private anatomy lecturer whose students were drawn from Edinburgh Medical College...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_and_ ... e_and_Hare

Before the Anatomy Act of 1832 widened the supply, the only legal supply of corpses for anatomical purposes in the UK were those condemned to death and dissection by the courts. This led to a chronic shortage of legitimate subjects for dissection, and this shortage became more serious as the need to train medical students grew, and the number of executions fell. In his school Knox ran up against the problem from the start, since – after 1815 – the Royal Colleges had increased the anatomical work in the medical curriculum. If he taught according to what was known as ‘French method’ the ratio would have had to approach one corpse per pupil.

As a consequence, body-snatching became so prevalent that it was not unusual for relatives and friends of someone who had just died to watch over the body until burial, and then to keep watch over the grave after burial, to stop it being violated. In November 1827 William Hare began a new career when an indebted lodger died on him by chance. He was paid £7.10/- (seven pounds & ten shillings) for delivering the body to Knox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Knox

Might be worth considering. You couldn't really get away with teaching anatomy using murdered or plundered bodies in the college after a certain time period, but you could do so in other places, and there was a large and professionally interested audience who would've been willing to pay good money to observe the dissections, even at the cost of some dirtiness and discomfort.

This ties in with another interesting Edinburgh mystery from around the times of Burke and Hare, but I don't work for the Tourist Board so I'll shut up for now.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

.
Dr. Robert Knox:

His 'continental' lectures were not for the squeamish. John James Audubon, was in Edinburgh at the time to find subscribers for his Birds of America. Shown round the dissecting theatre by Knox, "dressed in an overgown and with bloody fingers", Audubon reported that "The sights were extremely disagreeable, many of them shocking beyond all I ever thought could be. I was glad to leave this charnel house and breathe again the salubrious atmosphere of the streets".

[Stephen Morgan]

Don't know about the Toronto tunnels Fresno, I had a search about but couldn't really find anything. Sounds interesting. Were they an older sewer or subway system, or do they go back a ways further than that? My brother told me that Canada in general is very, very modern and a bit "boxy" - I don't think most of us realise over here just how unusual it is to have centuries old buildings of vastly varying shapes and sizes all over the place. The Church at the back of my house (just a local Church, nothing fancy) is older than the United States of America, and no one even thinks about it. We are lucky, but we don't know it.

At my last flat I could see a castle out the window which has been a ruin since before the foundation of America. Fucking Roundheads. Allegedly has tunnels, but the entrace has a big metal gate across it. Used to be able to sneak under when I was young. Then they put another one across to put a stop to that. Too many people ate by the dragon, maybe. Still got dungeons, though. Bottle dungeons, with weird stories about Templars.

pics

Holy fuck. Any good websites to find out more about the place? I searched and found a few, but want more. Any in-depth stuff on the history, etc? Is that table-top thing original?

Get on a train. They do tours. Some of them ajoin the pub, Ye Olde Trippe to Jerusalemeee. As for the table, it was personally carved by Robin Hood when he used the tunnels to escape from the castle. Maybe. Unfortunately a lot of the tunnels have been destroyed by road developments, but no-one really knows how many there are.

[Stephen Morgan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Caves

Apparently the table top is actually a well accessible from the upper floors of a shopping centre (built in the side of a hill, obviously, hence upstairs caves).

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Excellent. Never been to Nottingham. Time to remedy that situation. Forthwith!

[semper occultus]

Years ago, me & Mrs Byrne were travelling south on the M42 & my car broke down. I was taken by a recovery vehicle to a garage in West Wycombe where I had 4 hours to kill whilst the car was fixed.

We took a walk through the village & discovered the Hellfire Club Tunnels and Caves there.

Apparently Benjamin Franklin was a visitor/participant in the goings ons there....

That's awesome! Another location for me to visit. That place is creepy as hell. So is Benjamin Franklin in many ways.

..presume you're refering to this ...

Benjamin Franklin's house: the naked truth

Restoration reveals secrets of American campaigner

Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent
The Guardian
Monday 11 August 2003 11.08 BST



Some time in 2005 visitors will be able to visit the tall narrow Georgian house in the heart of London where Benjamin Franklin once sat stark naked by the large first floor sash windows, "air bathing" and thinking about bifocals, electricity, economics, American politics, British diplomacy, or how to get the fire in his back room to draw better.

It is a fair bet that however passionately interested the visitors are in the political history of American independence, and the intellectual history of the Age of Enlightenment, what will transfix them is the windowless basement room, once part of the garden.

As restoration work by the Friends of Benjamin Franklin House began on 36 Craven Street, a Grade I listed house rescued from the brink of tottering collapse, a small pit was found in the basement room. A human thigh bone was found.

The coroner and the police were notified. Excavation continued. More human bone surfaced. And more. And more, until more than 1,200 pieces of bone were recovered.

Since the bones were too ancient to trouble Scotland Yard, they are now in the care of the Institute of Archaeology, where experts have already determined that they range from an old man to a human baby. Several skulls have been trepanned, and arm and leg bones chopped through.

The most plausible explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by Benjamin Franklin's young friend and protege, William Hewson. He had been a pupil of the most brilliant anatomist of the day, William Hunter, but the two fell out and Hewson started his own anatomy school - at the home of his mother-in-law Margaret Stephenson, just off the Strand, where Benjamin Franklin was also a lodger for 16 years.

He had a rich source of subjects at hand: the resurrection men could deliver bodies stolen from graveyards to the Thames wharf at the bottom of the street, while there was a weekly public execution at the gallows on the other side of the garden wall.

Benjamin Franklin, who was interested in absolutely everything - he was lucky to escape killing himself or his guests at the demonstrations of electricity he was wont to give during dinner parties - must have attended the public dissections.

Hewson died young of blood poisoning after he cut himself during a dissection.

Franklin eventually returned to the United States, but was estranged from his abandoned family, and separated from the illegitimate son who shared his London years when Franklin declared for American independence and the son was exiled for his loyalty to England.

The house was less than 30 years old when Franklin came to London and rented the best first floor rooms, where he was visited by all the leading figures in radical politics, science and philosophy.

It continued as a boarding house, became a small hotel and then offices, but gradually became derelict.

It was always a shrine to visiting Americans, as the only surviving home of Benjamin Franklin on either side of the Atlantic, but by the 1970s when it was given to the Friends of the Benjamin Franklin House it was near collapse.

It has taken until now to find the money to restore the house, and they are still raising the last £900,000.

The house has survived flooding, fire, rot, and the second world war bomb which demolished the two houses opposite it in the narrow street, with most of its original features battered but intact, including handsome panelling, window shutters and staircase - and the frame for the metal damper which Franklin designed, and did install in the troublesome back room fireplace.

· www.thersa.org/franklin

[Stephen Morgan]

Excellent. Never been to Nottingham. Time to remedy that situation. Forthwith!

To interpret the name of Nottingham as signifying "Town of Caves" is an ancient, and apparently an ineradicable error, arising out of a misreading of the words of Asser. However, the old writers were not nearly so blameworthy herein as in respect to many other stumbling blocks they placed in the paths of posterity. Indeed, it was a frequent hypothesis, in former days, that the cavities below the ground were capable of swallowing up the whole of the town above. In early local deeds and charters relating to town properties it became customary to insert the clause "as well above as below ground," or words to that effect. It is unquestioned that this was, par excellence, the characteristic feature of ancient Nottingham, distinguishing it from all other English towns, and one that might reasonably have been expected to furnish it with a name.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Thanks for that Stephen, quality info. I'm saving for a visit now.

Semper, yeah, that was what I meant, Ben Franklin was a... genius. Or to put it another way, a massive weirdo. Jefferson too. I suppose, since they were interested in literally everything scientific, natural, and medical, and all the systems that life depends on, it's not that surprising they also had an interest in anatomy which extended into (ahem) practical experimentation. Still creepy though. And to think it still goes on.