The Real Mary King's Close

The Story of The Real Mary King's Close

Beneath the Royal Mile, buried under the foundations of the City Chambers, lies one of Edinburgh's most extraordinary secrets: a network of narrow streets and domestic spaces that were sealed off and literally built over in the eighteenth century. The Real Mary King's Close takes visitors underground to explore these preserved seventeenth-century streets, offering an unfiltered glimpse into the daily realities of life — and death — in one of Europe's most densely populated cities.

The close takes its name from Mary King, a prominent burgess and fabric merchant who lived and traded on the street in the early seventeenth century. In its heyday, the close was a bustling residential and commercial thoroughfare, home to merchants, tradespeople, and their families who lived in the characteristic Edinburgh tenement style — stacked vertically in buildings that rose to seven or eight storeys. The close was one of Edinburgh's widest and most prosperous streets, its residents relatively well-to-do by the standards of the time.

Everything changed with the plague. In 1645, a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague swept through Edinburgh, and the closes of the Old Town — densely packed and lacking any modern sanitation — were particularly hard hit. Popular legend has long held that the authorities sealed off Mary King's Close with infected residents still inside, leaving them to die. The truth, while less cinematically horrifying, was grim enough: the close was quarantined, plague victims were moved to temporary camps outside the city walls, and the buildings were fumigated using sulphur and vinegar. The plague killed an estimated half of Edinburgh's population.

The close continued to be inhabited after the plague, but its fortunes declined over the following century. In 1753, the Royal Exchange (now the City Chambers) was constructed on top of the close, using the upper storeys of the existing buildings as foundations. The lower levels — the ground floors and basements — were simply sealed off and incorporated into the new building's undercroft. The result was that entire rooms, staircases, and street surfaces were preserved in a state of suspended animation, hidden from the city above.

Today, guided tours lead visitors through these subterranean spaces, bringing the seventeenth-century city vividly to life. The tour passes through the reconstructed home of a sawmaker's family, complete with period furnishings that illustrate the cramped conditions in which ordinary Edinburgh residents lived. The most atmospheric space is the street level of the original close itself — a narrow, stone-flagged passageway with the original building frontages still intact on either side. Standing in this underground street, with the ceiling of the modern City Chambers pressing down overhead, the sense of time collapsing is extraordinary.

One of the most visited rooms on the tour is a small chamber known as Annie's Room. According to a Japanese psychic who visited in the 1990s, the room is haunted by the spirit of a young girl named Annie who was abandoned during the plague. Whether one believes in such things or not, the room has become a focus for visitors, who leave dolls, toys, and teddy bears for Annie's ghost. The collection has grown to thousands of items and is periodically donated to children's charities — a touching modern tradition layered onto a seventeenth-century tragedy.

The Real Mary King's Close is not merely a tourist attraction — it is an archaeological time capsule. The preservation of domestic spaces, street surfaces, and architectural details provides historians with invaluable evidence about urban life in early modern Scotland. It challenges the sanitised narrative of Edinburgh's past and confronts visitors with the cramped, dark, and often dangerous reality of life in a pre-industrial city. For anyone who wants to understand what Edinburgh was truly like before the elegant New Town was built, there is no more powerful or evocative experience.