Tour Scotland 4K travel video , with Scottish music, of the gravestone of a 15th Century Medieval woman on ancestry, genealogy, family history visit to the Mort House in Abdie, Fife, Britain, United Kingdom. A morthouse or deadhouse was a specialised secure building usually located in a churchyard where bodies were temporarily interred before a formal funeral took place. These buildings date back to the time when bodysnatchers or resurrectionists frequently illegally exhumed dead bodies that were then sold for dissection as part of human anatomy training at universities, etc. Morthouses were alternatives to mortsafes, watch houses, watch towers, etc. A morthouse differs from a mortuary or morgue, which is a facility for the storage of human corpses awaiting identification or autopsy prior to burial. The Christian tradition at the time was that resurrection after death and entry into the afterlife required the body of the deceased to be whole at burial so that person could enter the kingdom of Heaven for eternal life complete in body and soul. Morthouses usually did away with the expense of employing watchmen and money was therefore invested in making such buildings as secure as possible with thick stone walls, no windows, metal inner doors and outer doors with extra metal reinforcement to the locks and the wooden body of the door. Some morthouses were built up against existing structures such as the graveyard wall to save on construction costs. A number of morthouses were built partly underground or were effectively subterranean to give added security, some were lead lined to prevent water seeping into the vault and air vents were a common feature. Massive walls were typical if the building was at ground level and one example was circular to make breaking through the wall more difficult.
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