Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh

If there is one place you can be pretty sure of finding magic, it is in an old graveyard, and my visit to Greyfriar’s Kirkyard in Edinburgh this week certainly didn’t disappoint. The graveyard is situated on the edge of the city’s Old Town, and has been in use since the 16th Century, so there are lots of wonderful old tombs and carved stones to look at.

A packed corner of Greyfriars Kirkyard

As I wandered around the graveyard, I noticed skulls and skeletons everywhere. A rather lively looking dancing skeleton welcomes you as you enter, and many of the tombs are decorated with carved Memento Mori, suitably macabre reminders of our own mortality.

A Dancing Skeleton near the entrance to Greyfriars Kirkyard

As well as being the last resting place of many of Scotland’s most prestigious citizens, the Kirkyard has also witnessed some dramatic events over the years. In 1679 over a thousand Covenanters, Scottish Christians who were battling for a new style of worship and church organisation, were kept prisoner in a corner of the graveyard. They were left out of doors for over four months, surviving on scraps of bread and any extra food which kindly locals were able to sneak in to them. Not surprisingly many died, and more were later executed, and the melancholy spot now bears a memorial to those who lost their lives in this atrocity.

The Covenaters’ Prison, Greyfriars Kirkyard

The tomb of the man largely responsible for these terrible events sits just a few yards away. Sir George Mackenzie (1636-1691), later known as “Bloody Mackenzie” for obvious reasons, now rests in a rather grand, if slightly overgrown monument, designed by famous Scottish architect James Smith.

The tomb of “Bloody” Mackenzie

I say that he rest there, but in fact recent reports of ghostly events near the tomb suggest that Mackenzie is not resting at all, with hundreds of unexplained events in the graveyard in recent years being blamed on his malevolent spirit. If you really want to be creeped out, then ghost tours of the Kirkyard are held every evening. Check it out, if you dare…

A Memento Mori in Greyfriars Kirkyard

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The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

I spent a few days in Oxford last week, a beautiful town that is most definitely packed with magic. One of the most intriguing places that I visited was the Pitt Rivers Museum, situated in a suitably gothic building and home to Oxford University’s vast anthropological and archaeological collections.

The wondefully gothic exterior of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

Originally founded in 1884 by the magnificently named Lt-General Augustus Pitt Rivers, the original donation of 22,000 objects has now grown to an amazing 500,000, with many of them packed into the maze of glass cases that fills the museum today.

The packed interior of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

The museum collection includes weird and wonderful items from all over the world, many of them collected and donated by explorers, missionaries and scholars during the last century. I wandered round on my own, but quickly noticed lots of eyes staring at me from spooky tribal masks, ancient sculptures and cases full of colourful puppets. This Indian ‘Scare Devil’, which was believed to keep malevolent spirits at bay, sent a shiver down my spine.

A googly-eyed ‘Scare Devil’ from India

There also seem to be an inordinate number of human skulls, many of them adorned in strange, magical ways. I was particularly drawn to one skull from Nigeria which had been elaborately decorated with feathers as part of local burial rites.

An elaborately decorated human skull from Nigeria in the Pitt Rivers Museum

But my favourite objects were definitely the shrunken heads. Originally from the Upper Amazon region of South American, these creepy little heads had their skull and brains removed before being filled over and over again with warm sand for a period of several months, gradually shrinking them down until could be strung onto a cord which was worn round the neck during religious ceremonies.

One of the many shrunken heads in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

There are so many incredible things in the Pitt Rivers Museum, it is the kind of place that you could spend hours wandering around. Every glass case is packed with treasures, some quite mundane, some incredible bizarre, some fairly new, others very, very ancient. Magic-seekers of all ages will love this place, although with all those skulls, shrunken heads, tribal masks and puppets, a visit here can certainly be a rather unsettling experience.