I first read about the watch house at Old Petty Church while researching a route for my work as a tour guide. A tiny building beside an old Highland graveyard, built for people to watch over the newly buried? Of course I had to go and find it for myself.
So off I went to Old Petty.
Tucked into the slope beside what was once the main entrance to the burial ground is a small stone building. It looks almost like a miniature cottage, with a doorway in the gable, small windows and a slate roof.
But this wasn’t somebody’s home. They built the little watch house at Old Petty Parish Church in 1825.
The Watch House at Old Petty
The little building is Old Petty Parish Church’s watch house, built in 1825.
Historic Environment Scotland describes it as a rectangular rubble watch house, built into the slope beside the gate piers and the former main entrance to the burial ground. Its position makes perfect sense once you know what was happening in Scotland’s graveyards during the early 19th century.
People were stealing bodies. Not jewellery from graves. Not valuables from coffins. The bodies themselves.
Scotland’s Resurrection Men
By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, medical science was advancing rapidly. Anatomy students needed human bodies to dissect in order to learn, but there simply weren’t enough bodies legally available to them. The result was a lucrative illegal trade.
Men known as resurrectionists, or resurrection men, would enter graveyards at night, dig down to a recently buried coffin and remove the body. Resurrection men could then sell the fresh corpses to anatomists and medical schools.
Understandably, people were horrified. And communities began finding ways to protect their dead. Families protected some graves with heavy stones or iron structures known as mortsafes. Elsewhere, people physically watched over new graves.
And in some graveyards, they built watch houses. Like the one at Petty.
Watching the Dead in the Highlands
What I find particularly fascinating is that this wasn’t simply something happening far away in Edinburgh or Glasgow.
The fear had reached the Highlands too. Just two years after the Petty watch house was built, people in Inverness petitioned the Town Council for a small building with a fireplace in the Chapel Yard to provide shelter for those who were “watching the dead”.
The 1827 petition said that graveyards elsewhere in the country had been violated so frequently that guarding the dead had become almost indispensable.
Interestingly, it also said that such crimes had seldom, if ever, happened in Inverness. Yet the fear was real enough that the Chapel Yard was reportedly occupied almost every night by people keeping watch.
The watch house even had its own fireplace, providing some warmth for those spending long hours guarding the burial ground. Imagine sitting inside on a cold Highland night in the 1820s, a fire burning in the grate, watching the graveyard outside and waiting to see whether anyone appeared in the darkness.
And Then Came Burke and Hare
Three years after they built the Petty watch house, two men in Edinburgh became the most infamous names associated with this dark period in Scottish history.
William Burke and William Hare.
But there’s an important distinction. Burke and Hare weren’t really body snatchers. They found an easier way of supplying fresh bodies.
They murdered people.
During 1828, Burke and Hare killed 16 people and sold their bodies for dissection to the Edinburgh anatomist Dr Robert Knox. Their victims were often poor or vulnerable people who were unlikely to be immediately missed. When the crimes were eventually uncovered, Scotland was horrified.
The authorities hanged Burke in Edinburgh in January 1829. And there was a particularly grim twist to his punishment. His own body was handed over for anatomical dissection. His skeleton survives today in the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum.
Hare, meanwhile, really was the one who got away with it. He gave evidence against Burke in return for immunity, walked free and eventually disappeared from the historical record.
The End of the Body Snatchers
The scandal surrounding Burke and Hare added to the growing pressure for reform.
In 1832, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act. It increased the legal supply of bodies available for anatomical study and helped remove the market which had made stealing freshly buried corpses profitable.
The era of the resurrection men gradually came to an end. Petty’s watch house had been built only seven years earlier. Suddenly, buildings like it were no longer needed for the purpose for which they had been constructed.
A Tiny Building With a Dark Story
Today, Old Petty is wonderfully peaceful.
The old church, burial ground, mausoleum and watch house are protected as a listed historic site, and it would be very easy to wander around without realising why that little building beside the old entrance was there.
I certainly wouldn’t have guessed its story just by looking at it. But that’s what I love about exploring old Scottish graveyards. Sometimes the smallest, most easily overlooked building turns out to have the biggest story.
And at Petty, that little stone watch house is a reminder of a time when burying someone wasn’t necessarily enough. For a while afterwards, somebody still had to watch over the dead.
Where is Old Petty Church?
Old Petty Church lies between Inverness and Nairn, overlooking the Moray Firth and surrounded by Castle Stuart Golf Links.
I cycled out to explore it, and getting to the church is part of the adventure. The final approach is on foot, and you actually walk through Castle Stuart Golf Links to reach the old church and graveyard.
Old Petty Church has so much more to offer
The church you see today was built in 1839, replacing an earlier church of 1769, although the history of worship on this site goes back much further. The church eventually closed in 1950 and today stands empty, while the surrounding graveyard is still used for burials.
There is much more to Old Petty Church than the watch house. Attached to the east end of the church is the much older Mackintosh Mausoleum, dating from around 1686 and built as a burial place for the Lairds of Mackintosh and their ladies. Look out for the wonderful cast-iron cats guarding its entrance. The cat forms part of the crest associated with the Mackintoshes and Clan Chattan.
The church, the Mackintoshes and the history of Petty deserve a story of their own, so I’ll come back to those in a separate blog.
For now, though, it was the curious little building beside the old entrance to the graveyard that had brought me here.
The watch house.
References / Further Reading
- Historic Environment Scotland: Petty Parish Church, Burial Ground, Watch House and Mackintosh Mausoleum
- Highland Historic Environment Record: Petty Parish Church Watch House
- High Life Highland: Dissecting the 1832 Anatomy Act
- UK Parliament: Body Snatching
- University of Edinburgh: William Hare
- North of Scotland Archaeological Society: Petty Bay on the Moray Firth
- University of Edinburgh -William Burke – Hanged in 1829 for his part in the West Port murders.
- Escape the Past – Who were Burke & Hare? Edinburgh’s Infamous “Body Snatchers”
- BBC – Anatomy and crime – Burke and Hare: The body snatchers
