Tour Scotland 4K travel video, with Scottish bagpipes music, of the Watchtower by Abbey Church on ancestry, genealogy, family history visit to Coupar Angus, Perthshire, Britain, United Kingdom. The graveyard in Coupar Angus includes a polygon shaped watchtower that was employed in the 19th century as a guard against body-snatchers. This burial ground of on the site of the old Abbey, which was founded by King Malcohn in 1164. It is said to have been previously used as a Roman camp. Body snatching, ot grave robbing, flourished in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and died out completely with the passing of the Anatomy Act of 1832. The process of digging up corpses by resurrection men was a major worry throughout Europe. Many criminals specialised in digging up the bodies of the dead but the crimes of Burke and Hare pushed Scotland to prominence as a centre of the trade as in the early nineteenth-century Edinburgh boasted one of the finest anatomical hospitals in the world. The idea that trainee doctors should study human anatomy was incorporated into the very fabric of Scottish surgery. The 1505 charter of the Royal College of Surgeons insisted that such knowledge was essential. The Burke and Hare murders were a series of sixteen killings committed over a period of about ten months in 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland. They were undertaken by William Burke and William Hare, who sold the corpses to Robert Knox for dissection at his anatomy lectures. William Burke and William Hare both originated from the Province of Ulster in the north of Ireland and moved to Scotland to work on the Union Canal, Burke having abandoned a wife and two children back in Ireland. The pair met and became close friends when Burke moved with his mistress Helen McDougal to lodgings in Tanner’s Close in the West Port area of Edinburgh. Hare lived on the same street and was running a boarding house there with Margaret Laird, a widower with whom he lived as man and wife, and who was also known as Margaret Hare even though they were not legally married. William Burke was hanged for the murders at Lawnmarket in Edinburgh in front of a boisterous, cheering crowd of over 25,000 on 28 January 1829 and, fittingly perhaps, after being put on public display, his body was donated to medical science. Despite his obvious involvement in the murders, his accomplice Hare was released in February 1829 and escaped across the border into England. No one knows definitively what happened to Hare, but it has been rumoured that he was thrown into a lime quarry by an angry mob and lived out his days as a blind beggar on the streets of London. Of interest to folks with ancestry, genealogy or Scottish Family Roots in Scotland who may wish to visit one day. Find things to see and do in Scotland where you are always welcome.
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