# Greyfriars Kirk

church in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

City of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Sacred place

## Story

• Greyfriars Kirk is the parish church of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh’s Old Town, built in the burial ground of a Franciscan friary and first used for congregational worship on Christmas Day 1620.
• The National Covenant was signed here in 1638, in front of the pulpit and inside the kirk, while other accounts place the signing in the kirkyard, and the churchyard account dates it 26 February.
• Gunpowder stored in the west tower exploded in May 1718, and a fire on 19 January 1845 gutted the eastern half, after which the building held two congregations until they were reunited in the 1930s.
• The church and kirkyard were listed together in Category A on 14 December 1970. The yard holds monuments from the seventeenth century onward, including the ground where Covenanter prisoners were held in 1679.
• In April 2026 a cracked ledger stone was lifted in the Bayne of Pitcairlie enclosure. Burial activity was found, and no vault entrance was uncovered.

## Visiting

Entry is free, although donations are encouraged. The Kirk, the Story of Greyfriars Museum and shop are normally open from 10.30 to 16.30 Monday to Friday and open from 12.00 to 16.00 on Saturday, from April to October. Opening times may change, so the usual hours should be checked against the day, which is open from 10.30 when the ordinary timetable applies. The Kirk is closed for general visiting on many days in August, when ticketed events replace the usual 10.30 opening.
Bespoke tours have no separate tickets. They have a recommended donation of £10 a head, with a smaller donation accepted for children or for groups over 15, and they take place when the Kirk is open from 10.30. History tours ask for a donation of whatever the visitor can give, and they take place when the Kirk is open from 10.30. The kirkyard gate is open daily for access at all hours.

## History

Greyfriars Kirk is the parish church of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh’s Old Town, set in the kirkyard between the Grassmarket and Candlemaker Row. The building is an aisled nave of eight bays, 162 feet long and 72 feet wide, in a survival of Gothic mixed with Baroque. The church and the churchyard were listed together in Category A on 14 December 1970, and the churchyard record was updated on 29 March 2019.

The ground had belonged to the Tours of Inverleith since 1388. Observant Franciscans invited by James I reached Scotland in 1447 and settled at this corner in 1453 or 1458, and the same account has the house receiving Mary of Guelders in 1449 and sheltering Henry VI. The friary was ransacked on 28 June 1559, and in the summer of 1560 all but one or two of the Edinburgh friars left for the Netherlands with about eighty others under John Patrick. Mary, Queen of Scots, granted the grounds for a burial ground in 1562, after the buildings had been stripped for stone.

A south-west parish created on paper in 1584 was settled in 1598 in the upper tolbooth of St Giles’, and the council chose this yard for a new church in 1601.

Accounts of the start of building give 1601, 1602, and 1612. Clement Russell and Patrick Cochrane were masters of works, Swedish timber was taken at sea by Christian IV, and stones of 1613 and 1614 mark progress. The kirk was first used on 18 February 1619 for the funeral of William Couper, and congregational worship began on Christmas Day 1620, a Monday chosen by Patrick Galloway because James VI and I disliked opposition to holy days. It was the first church built in Edinburgh after the Reformation, and for a long time the largest of its kind in Scotland.

The first building was six bays with a west tower.

On 23 July 1637 James Fairlie’s reading of Charles I’s service book caused a tumult. The National Covenant was signed in 1638, dated 26 February in the churchyard account. The congregation’s own pages place the signing in front of the pulpit and inside the kirk, and also in the kirkyard, while first-hand accounts are said to place it only inside. Archibald Johnston read it from the pulpit.

Charles treated the Covenant as rebellion, and the Bishops' Wars of 1639 and 1640 followed.

Oliver Cromwell’s army took Edinburgh after the Battle of Dunbar (1650), fought on 3 September 1650 against David Leslie. From 1650 to 1653 the kirk was a cavalry barracks and the furnishings were destroyed. A dividing wall of 1656 was removed in 1662. In 1660 George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle, announced in the kirk that he would march south.

After the Battle of Bothwell Bridge on 22 June 1679, Covenanter prisoners were held on ground beside the yard, later marked by the Martyrs’ Monument.

Gunpowder stored in the tower exploded in May 1718, dated both 2 May and the early morning of 7 May. Alexander McGill (architect) added two western bays and a north porch, the porch dated 1721 and also 1722, and the repaired building held two congregations by 31 December 1722. Old Greyfriars used the east and New Greyfriars the west. A fire on 19 January 1845 gutted the eastern half.

David Bryce refurnished New Greyfriars for a reopening in 1846, and David Cousin rebuilt Old Greyfriars in 1856 and 1857.

Robert Lee (minister), who had stayed in the established church at the Disruption of 1843, then introduced a service book, standing, kneeling, prepared prayers, and coloured glass. The glass is called the first in a Scottish parish church since the Reformation, and also the first in an Edinburgh Presbyterian church. James Ballantine and his partner, the firm spelled both Allan and Allen, made most of the 1857 windows. A harmonium followed in 1863 and a pipe organ in 1865.

Lee was injured in 1867 and died in 1868.

The two congregations united in 1929. Henry Kerr, also named Henry F. Kerr, reunited the interior between 1931 and 1938, or from 1932 to 1938, under a ceiling of California redwood. The present Peter Collins organ is dated 1988, 1989, and 1990, with almost or nearly 3,400 pipes.

Gaelic worship, begun for soldiers in the castle in 1704, has been held in this building since the 1979 union. Since 2016 the former Kirk o’ Field buildings have served as a centre named for Archibald Charteris. Alison Elliot, an elder here, was the first woman to moderate the General Assembly, in 2004, and the first lay moderator since George Buchanan in 1567.

The kirkyard, closed for burials but maintained, holds about 590 stones and was the city’s principal cemetery. Greyfriars Bobby, whose story is disputed, is remembered by an 1867 portrait and by a carving on the organ. Watching briefs in 1996 and 2003 found human bone, and in 2003 a culvert and the remains of at least 29 people. On 18 April 2026 a cracked ledger was lifted in the Bayne of Pitcairlie enclosure.

Burial activity was found, and no vault entrance was uncovered.

## Photographs

- [Greyfriars' Kirk, Edinburgh, Scotland. North side. — Otter](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Greyfriars%27_Kirk_Edinburgh_20100920_north_side.jpg)
- [This is a photo of listed building number — Carlos Delgado](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Greyfriars_Kirk_-_01.jpg)
- [Greyfriars Kirk — Remi Mathis](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Edinburgh_-_Greyfriars_Kirk.JPG)
- [current interior Greyfriars Kirk — Stephencdickson](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Current_interior_Greyfriars_Kirk.JPG)
- [Greyfriars Kirk — Thomas Hosmer Shepherd](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/MA%281829%29_p.182_-_Grey_Friars%27_Church%2C_Edinburgh_-_Thomas_Hosmer_Shepherd.jpg)
- [Edinburgh — jockrutherford from Owen Sound, ON](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Edinburgh_%2812206597164%29.jpg)
- [img_3278 — David](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Edinburgh_img_3278_%283657313579%29.jpg)
- [img_3323 — David](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Edinburgh_img_3323_%283658079126%29.jpg)
- [img_1184 — David](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Edinburgh_img_1184_%283658385396%29.jpg)
- [img_1185 — David](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Edinburgh_img_1185_%283657591301%29.jpg)

## Sources

- [Greyfriars Kirk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Kirk) — Wikipedia
- [History and heritage](https://greyfriarskirk.com/community/history-heritage/) — Greyfriars Kirk
- [The National Covenant](https://greyfriarskirk.com/history/the-national-covenant) — Greyfriars Kirk
- [Our story](https://greyfriarskirk.com/about-us/our-story/) — Greyfriars Kirk
- [Visit us](https://greyfriarskirk.com/visit/) — Greyfriars Kirk
- [Frequently asked questions](https://greyfriarskirk.com/faqs/) — Greyfriars Kirk
- [Tours](https://greyfriarskirk.com/visit/tours/) — Greyfriars Kirk
- [Greyfriars Church listing](https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/apex/f?p=1505:300:::::VIEWTYPE,VIEWREF:designation,LB27018) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Greyfriars Churchyard listing](https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/apex/f?p=1505:300:::::VIEWTYPE,VIEWREF:designation,LB27029) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Unlocking the Secrets of Greyfriars](https://fogk.org/2026/05/03/unlocking-the-secrets-of-greyfriars/) — Friends of Greyfriars Kirkyard
- [Repairs to the Bayne Mausoleum](https://fogk.org/2025/05/22/repairs-to-the-bayne-mausoleum/) — Friends of Greyfriars Kirkyard
- [Greyfriars Kirkhouse evaluation](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/issue.xhtml?recordId=1109215&recordType=GreyLitSeries) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Kirk museum](https://greyfriarskirk.com/visit/kirk-museum/) — Greyfriars Kirk
- [Working towards union, January 2024](https://greyfriarskirk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Newsletter-January-final-2.pdf) — Greyfriars Kirk
- [Greyfriars churchyard](https://www.trove.scot/place/52398) — Trove
- [Alexander McGill (architect)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_McGill_(architect)) — Wikipedia
- [David Bryce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bryce) — Wikipedia
- [David Cousin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cousin) — Wikipedia
- [James Ballantine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ballantine) — Wikipedia
- [Oliver Cromwell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell) — Wikipedia
- [Robert Lee (minister)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_(minister)) — Wikipedia
- [Alison Elliot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Elliot) — Wikipedia
- [Archibald Charteris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Charteris) — Wikipedia
- [National Covenant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Covenant) — Wikipedia
- [Battle of Dunbar (1650)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dunbar_(1650)) — Wikipedia
- [Battle of Bothwell Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bothwell_Bridge) — Wikipedia
- [Legacies in Stone](https://ewh.org.uk/legacies-in-stone-wins-funding-from-the-national-lottery-heritage-fund/) — Edinburgh World Heritage
- [Greyfriars' Kirk Edinburgh 20100920 north side.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greyfriars%27_Kirk_Edinburgh_20100920_north_side.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Greyfriars Kirk - 01.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greyfriars_Kirk_-_01.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Edinburgh - Greyfriars Kirk.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edinburgh_-_Greyfriars_Kirk.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Current interior Greyfriars Kirk.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Current_interior_Greyfriars_Kirk.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [MA(1829) p.182 - Grey Friars' Church, Edinburgh - Thomas Hosmer Shepherd.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MA(1829)_p.182_-_Grey_Friars%27_Church,_Edinburgh_-_Thomas_Hosmer_Shepherd.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Edinburgh (12206597164).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edinburgh_(12206597164).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Edinburgh img 3278 (3657313579).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edinburgh_img_3278_(3657313579).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Edinburgh img 3323 (3658079126).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edinburgh_img_3323_(3658079126).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Edinburgh img 1184 (3658385396).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edinburgh_img_1184_(3658385396).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Edinburgh img 1185 (3657591301).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edinburgh_img_1185_(3657591301).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Greyfriars Kirk, in Gaelic Eaglais nam Manach Liath, is a parish church of the Church of Scotland in the Old Town of Edinburgh. It stands inside Greyfriars Kirkyard, with the Grassmarket to the north and Candlemaker Row to the east. The present congregation uses the name Greyfriars Kirk. From 1979 until 2013 the united charge was called Greyfriars, Tolbooth, and Highland Kirk. The building is a rectangular aisled nave of eight bays, 162 feet (49 meters) long and 72 feet (22 meters) wide, in a survival of Gothic fused with Baroque. The walls are harled rubble with ashlar dressings. It is an active parish church, and it was placed in Category A, together with the churchyard as a group, on 14 December 1970. Supplementary information for the churchyard was updated on 29 March 2019.

The ground belonged to the family of the Tours of Inverleith from 1388. Observant Franciscan friars first came to Scotland in 1447, invited by James I. Six friars, one of them a Scot, arrived from the Low Countries under Cornelius of Zierikzee. They settled at the corner of the Grassmarket and Candlemaker Row in either 1453 or 1458. The same account of the house says that it hosted Mary of Guelders when she arrived in Edinburgh in 1449 and that it sheltered Henry VI of England during his exile. James III confirmed the friars’ rights to the land in 1479. In 1464 the Provost of St Giles’ granted the Chapel of St John outside the West Port to Friar Crannok, warden of the Grey Friars. What became of that chapel is not known.

James IV made himself the Observants’ royal protector, and Friar Ranny, warden in Edinburgh, was the king’s confessor. By the middle of the sixteenth century the house held fifty to sixty friars. The southern and western walls of the friary grounds were strengthened between 1513 and 1515 as part of the Flodden Wall. The Scottish Reformation was the break with the Catholic Church and the establishment of the Protestant Church of Scotland. In 1560 the Lords of the Congregation controlled government, and the Reformation Parliament passed a Protestant creed and rejected papal supremacy. James VI ratified that legislation in 1567. John Knox directed a Presbyterian and largely Calvinist kirk.

In 1558 reformers stole the statue of St Giles from the burgh church. The Greyfriars lent their own statue for the St Giles’ Day procession on 1 September, and reformers damaged it when they broke up the procession. On 28 June 1559, when news came that the Lords of the Congregation were advancing, Lord Seton, provost of Edinburgh, gave up his promise to protect the friars. A mob ransacked the friary. The friars sheltered with allies in the city. In the summer of 1560 the Observant Franciscans of Scotland, including all but one or two of the Edinburgh house, left for the Netherlands. Those exiles numbered about eighty and were led by the provincial, John Patrick. One account dates the dissolution of the friary to 1559, when the ground reverted to the crown. Another places the passing of the grounds to the crown after the Reformation of 1560.

By 1565 the friary buildings had been taken down and the stones carried off for the New Tolbooth and for repairs to St Giles’ and its kirkyard walls. The kirkyard at St Giles’ was overcrowded. Mary, Queen of Scots, queen from 14 December 1542 until her abdication on 24 July 1567, gave the friary grounds to the town council in 1562 for a burial ground. She was the daughter of James V, was brought up in France, and returned to Scotland in August 1561 after the death of her husband Francis in December 1560. The churchyard account says the council petitioned her in 1562 so that the site could relieve congestion at St Giles. The kirk’s own history says that after 1560 the grounds passed to her and that she then granted them to the council. Until 1591 burials were kept to the northern half. The magistrates held the upper yard, where the kirk now stands, and wapinschaws were held there. A gate was set in 1562 where the north gate stands now. The gateway on Greyfriars Place, opposite the meeting of Candlemaker Row and George IV Bridge, was added in 1624.

The congregation’s origin is an edict of 1584 that divided Edinburgh into four parishes and created a south-west parish meant to meet in the middle of St Giles’. That edict does not seem to have been enforced until 1598, when the south-west parish was given the upper tolbooth at the west end of St Giles’. Robert Rollock and Peter Hewat were the first ministers. By the end of the century St Giles’ could not hold the growing town. In 1599 the council discussed and then dropped a new church on the grounds of Kirk o’ Field, near the later Chambers Street. In 1601 the council decided to build in the southern part of the Greyfriars burying ground.

The dates of the start of the work do not agree. One account places the start of work in 1601 and the opening in 1620. The masters of works were Clement Russell in 1602 and Patrick Cochrane in 1603 and 1604, and the kirk’s own history says building began in 1602. Another account says construction was not begun until 1612. Work is also described as under way by 1602, when Russell was master of work to the kirk begun in the burial place, and the council then ordered the buttresses and doors of the Convent of St Catherine of Siena at Sciennes to be taken for the new church. Work seems to have paused. The council moved to start again in 1611, and only in December 1612 did it order the building to go forward with all convenient speed. A merchant, Thomas Watsoun, bought Swedish timber for the roof in 1612. Two of his ships were taken by Christian IV of Denmark, then at war with Sweden. A date stone on the east gable is marked 1614 and shows the arms of Edinburgh. The north-east pillar, since replaced, was recorded as marked 1613.

The kirk was first used on 18 February 1619 for the funeral of William Couper, bishop of Galloway. John Spottiswoode, archbishop of St Andrews, preached. Congregational worship began on Christmas Day 1620. That day was a Monday. The minister, Patrick Galloway, chose it to please James VI and I, who disliked the radical reformers’ opposition to holy days. James VI and I, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, was king of Scotland from 24 July 1567 and king of England and Ireland from 24 March 1603 until his death on 27 March 1625. He was raised a Protestant, and his minority ended officially in 1578, though he did not fully control government until 1583. Greyfriars was the first church built in Edinburgh after the Reformation, serving the south-west district, and its people moved from St Giles’. It was the largest post-Reformation church in Scotland until well into the eighteenth century. George Hay argued that an aisled nave, though exceptional after the Reformation, was not a return to pre-Reformation practice: there was no chancel, because Reformed worship stressed the gathered people, and the form was the one then known in these islands for a large church.

When it was finished the church was an aisled nave of six bays with external buttresses, a squat square-based tower at the west, and a curvilinear gable at the east. Doors stood in the north, south, and east walls, and probably in the outer wall of the tower. Octagonal pillars inside may have echoed those of St Giles’. Galleries stood on the east, the west, and probably the north, facing a pulpit against the middle south pillar. Worshippers stood or brought their own stools, and the pulpit was the only furniture. The old north door is now one of the main entrances, inside the porch. The original church ended where the great west arch now stands, above the organ. Gordon of Rothiemay’s map of 1647 is the only picture of the church before the explosion of 1718.

At the creation of the Diocese of Edinburgh in 1633 the ministers of Greyfriars were listed as prebendaries of St Giles’. Charles I of England, born 19 November 1600, became king of England, Scotland, and Ireland on 27 March 1625 and was executed on 30 January 1649. He believed in the divine right of kings. William Laud, born 7 October 1573, was made archbishop of Canterbury by Charles in 1633 and pressed ceremonial uniformity. He was arrested in 1640 and executed on 10 January 1645. In 1637 Charles tried to impose a service book on the Church of Scotland. On 23 July that year James Fairlie read it in Greyfriars. A tumult followed, and Fairlie exchanged curses with women of the congregation. The same day there was a riot at St Giles’. The next Sunday Andrew Ramsay refused to read the book and was deposed by royal authority.

The National Covenant was an agreement signed by many people in Scotland during 1638 against those Laudian changes. Its leaders used it to bind the opposition, and its supporters became known as Covenanters. Charles treated it as rebellion. That led to the Bishops' Wars of 1639 and 1640, the first of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and the cost of those wars pushed him to call the Short Parliament and the Long Parliament in England. The kirk’s history says the Covenant was presented and signed in front of the pulpit in 1638, and an original copy is displayed in the museum. The museum account says it was signed and adopted inside the kirk. The churchyard account says it was signed in the church on 26 February 1638. Another page of the same congregation says it was signed in the kirkyard in 1638. A note on the later retelling says that some secondary accounts place the signing in the kirkyard, while every first-hand account places it only in the kirk. Archibald Johnston read it from the pulpit. Nobility and gentry signed inside, and copies were carried through Edinburgh and Leith.

Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston, lived from 1611 to 1663. He assisted Alexander Henderson in writing the Covenant and was made procurator of the kirk in 1638. He helped negotiate the pacification of Berwick in 1639 and the treaty of Ripon in 1640. He became a lord of session as Lord Warriston in 1641. In 1643, as commissioner for Midlothian, he opposed neutrality in English affairs. He sat in the Westminster Assembly, joined the Committee of Both Kingdoms in 1644, and was named king’s advocate by Charles in 1646. He resisted the Engagement of 1648 and may have drawn up the Act of Classes in 1649. He was lord clerk register in 1649 and is said to have given David Leslie fatal advice at Dunbar, after which he lost his offices. In 1657 Oliver Cromwell renamed him lord clerk register. He sat in the House of Lords of Oliver and of Richard Cromwell and on the Council of State.

In 1650, as the troops of Oliver Cromwell approached, every able-bodied man of the town was ordered to assemble in the kirkyard. Oliver Cromwell, born 25 April 1599, died on 3 September 1658. He was a Parliamentarian commander, a leading advocate of the execution of Charles I in January 1649, and Lord Protector from December 1653 until his death. The Battle of Dunbar (1650) was fought on 3 September 1650 near Dunbar between Cromwell’s New Model Army and a Scottish army under David Leslie. The English won. It was the first major battle of the 1650 invasion. After the execution of Charles, Scotland recognised his son Charles II as king of all Britain on 1 May 1650. Cromwell crossed into Scotland on 22 July with more than 16,000 men. The Scots fell back on Edinburgh and stripped the country of food. At the end of August, his army sick and short of food, Cromwell withdrew to Dunbar, and the Scots took Doon Hill. He took Edinburgh after Dunbar. From 1650 to 1653 his troops occupied Greyfriars as a cavalry barracks and did serious damage. The interior and furnishings were destroyed. He may himself have preached in the kirk. The church was later repaired. Between 1656 and 1662 a cross wall divided the interior in expectation of two new parishes that never came, and the wall was taken down in 1662. The galleries were enlarged in 1696.

George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle, born 6 December 1608, died 3 January 1670. He fought on both sides in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, commanded the army in Scotland from 1655 to 1660, and his support was decisive in the return of Charles II in May 1660. In 1660 he announced in Greyfriars that he would march south for the Restoration. Episcopacy was then brought back, and the Covenanters rebelled again. Robert Traill, the covenanting minister of Greyfriars, was forced into exile. The Battle of Bothwell Bridge, also called the Battle of Bothwell Brig, was fought on 22 June 1679 between government troops and militant Presbyterian Covenanters, and it ended that short rebellion. The fight was at the bridge over the Clyde between Hamilton and Bothwell. After the defeat, prisoners were confined in a field beside the kirkyard, the eastern part of ground the council had bought in 1618. The Telfer Wall, named for the mason John Taillefer, was built from 1628 to 1636 around land south and west of the churchyard. The western part of that purchase was sold to the Heriot Trust for the hospital. The eastern boundary of the yard seems to have been part of the Flodden Wall. The Martyrs’ Monument remembers Covenanters executed in Edinburgh. It was put up in 1706 or 1707, an inscription panel with an open book in an Ionic aedicule, and it was renewed in 1771.

After the Glorious Revolution, Presbyterian government returned. William Carstares, chaplain and adviser to William II, was minister of Greyfriars from 1703 to 1707. From 1706 the council kept gunpowder on the third and fourth floors of the west tower. The explosion is dated both to 2 May 1718 and to about 1.45 in the morning of Sunday 7 May 1718, and the listing places it in May 1718. It destroyed the tower and damaged the two western bays. The session clerk wrote that it rent the western gable, broke all the glass, turned the slates, and broke a great deal of the leaden high roof. The congregation met in the chapel of George Heriot’s School and in the Lower Common Hall of the university while repairs went on. A new wall enclosed the eastern four bays within a month, with a turnpike stair. Galleries made up for lost space. The former north door was moved one bay east, and an angel’s head was carved on the keystone.

Alexander McGill (architect), who died in 1734, oversaw the repair. He was a mason and architect, in partnership with James Smith, and his work was influenced by Sir William Bruce. Some of his designs later appeared in William Adam’s Vitruvius Scoticus. He was the son of George McGill, a mason in Arbirlot, and was apprenticed in June 1697 to the Edinburgh mason Alexander Nisbet. He was in the masons’ lodge by 1710 and visited London in 1717. He worked at Kellie Castle from 1699, at Yester House with Smith from 1700, and he finished William Bruce’s design at the House of Nairn. His own designs included Donibristle House, Blair Drummond of 1715 to 1717, demolished in 1870, a town house in Glasgow’s Drygate for the first Duke of Montrose, demolished in 1855, and the original Mount Stuart, of which his pavilions survived a later fire. In November 1719 the council commissioned him to build the western church, with Gilbert Smith as mason. The remains of the tower were demolished and two new bays were added, so that each congregation had four bays. The work was finished by 31 December 1722 and paid for by a local duty on ale. The following autumn the council ordered a new congregation for the western half. William Robertson was its first minister. That charge was called Wester Greyfriars and then New Greyfriars. The original congregation stayed in the east and became Old Greyfriars. The kirk’s own account says the porch on the north was added in 1721. The listing and the longer architectural account place Alexander McGill’s Palladian north porch, and the recasting of the east gable, in 1722. He gave the west end a Dutch gable and a classical pediment, a semi-octagonal porch below it, a matching pediment on the east, and ball-topped obelisk finials on pediments and buttresses.

From the schools’ foundation until the late nineteenth century, New Greyfriars held lofts for the pupils of the Merchant Maiden Hospital and of George Heriot’s School, who had moved from Old Greyfriars. After 1871 the pupils of George Watson’s College also attended. Both charges were burgh churches, so the town council nominated the ministers until patronage in the Church of Scotland was abolished in 1874. New Greyfriars often received promising ministers who were soon moved to a two-charge city church, and many of its incumbencies were short. Three ministers of Old Greyfriars were moderator during their time there: George Kay in 1755, William Robertson in 1763, and John Inglis in 1804. Two ministers of New Greyfriars were moderator during their incumbencies: Robert Henry in 1774 and James Nicoll Ogilvie in 1918. Other ministers include the Covenanters Robert Douglas, Robert Traill, and Gilbert Rule, the statesman William Carstares, the philanthropist Thomas Guthrie, and the liturgical reformer Robert Lee.

In 1840 St John’s Church on Victoria Street was taken out of the parish of Old Greyfriars. Thomas Guthrie, minister of the second charge, became its first minister, and the Greyfriars charge ceased to be double. The Disruption of 1843 was a schism in which 450 evangelical ministers left the Church of Scotland and formed the Free Church of Scotland, over whether the church or the government controlled clerical places and benefits. Patronage was the quarrel. The Claim of Right of 1689 had ended royal and parliamentary interference in the church’s order and worship, and the Act of Union of 1707 ratified that claim. At Greyfriars, John Sym, minister of Old Greyfriars, left for the Free Church. Many of his people went with him, but all the elders stayed. Robert Lee (minister) was chosen for Old Greyfriars in 1843 and, unlike many of his peers, remained with the established church.

Robert Lee (minister) was born at Tweedmouth on 21 November 1804, the eldest of three sons of Jane Lambert and George Lee, a boat-builder. He was educated at Berwick Grammar School, worked six years in the family trade, and in 1824 went to the University of St Andrews to study classics. He was licensed by the presbytery of St Andrews in 1832 and ordained in 1833 to Inverbrothock chapel of ease, near Arbroath. In 1836 he moved to Campsie. He became the first professor of Biblical criticism at the University of Edinburgh and a dean of the Chapel Royal serving Queen Victoria. On 19 January 1845 a boiler flue overheated. Fire gutted Old Greyfriars, partly collapsed the arcades, and wrecked the roof and furnishings of New Greyfriars. The listing places the fire in January 1845. Because it followed the Disruption, some people called it a judgment on the established church. Hugh Miller argued, without success, that the congregations should move to St John’s on Victoria Street and leave Greyfriars as a ruin. Most of the town council had joined the Free Church, and their attempts to block the restoration were one reason it took twelve years. The people moved for a time to the Tolbooth Kirk.

David Bryce designed new furnishings for New Greyfriars, and that half reopened in 1846. A tall wainscot was installed, and galleries on the north, south, and east faced a canopied pulpit at the west. David Bryce, born 3 April 1803 at 5 South College Street in Edinburgh, died on 7 May 1876. His father was a grocer with a side business in building. He attended the Royal High School, entered William Burn’s office in 1825, was Burn’s partner by 1841, and the partnership ended in 1845 in a dispute over St Mary’s Church at Dalkeith for the Duke of Buccleuch. In the 1830s he lived at 8 Great Stuart Street. He was an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1835 and an academician in 1836, and he came to hold the foremost place in the profession in Scotland.

David Cousin rebuilt Old Greyfriars in 1856 and 1857. James Smith had been appointed first and did little more than take off the roof and demolish what remained of the arcades. Cousin filled the windows with ashlar pierced by early English lancets, made a simple triangular east gable with a new three-light lancet, and left the arcades down so that a single-span timber ceiling stood under a steep roof. Traces of fire damage can still be seen on the sides of the windows in the eastern half. In its own time the restoration was praised as a sign that Presbyterianism had admitted art as a handmaid of religion. Around the time of the 1930s work, Andrew Landale Drummond called the effect one of bleak though ornate ugliness. David Cousin, born in North Leith on 19 May 1809, died on 14 August 1878. He trained first as a joiner under his father, studied mathematics with Edward Sang, and then trained under William Henry Playfair, leaving that office in 1831. He competed without success for the Scott Monument. With the engineer William Gale he won the competitions for the West Church in Greenock and the parish church at Cambuslang. From 1841 to 1872 he was Edinburgh’s city superintendent of works, also called the city architect, first as assistant to Thomas Brown and then in Brown’s place.

At the minister’s request, painted glass was installed. The kirk’s own history calls it the first stained glass in any Scottish parish church since the Reformation. The listing calls it the first in an Edinburgh Presbyterian church since the Reformation, mainly by Ballantine and Allan in 1857, and largely unaltered since. Another account calls the windows of the eastern four bays the oldest stained glass in a Church of Scotland building, and the first coloured glass in such a building since the Reformation. They are grisaille with abstract pattern, except the east window, which has medallions of the Prodigal Son, the Wise and Foolish Virgins, the Good Samaritan, and the Pharisee and the Publican. Windows of that time remember John Erskine, Robert Traill, George Buchanan, William Robertson, and John Inglis. James Ballantine and his partner Allan, the name also spelled Allen, executed them, except the Anderson memorial in the north aisle, which is by Francis Barnett.

James Ballantine was born in the West Port of Edinburgh on 11 June 1806 and died on 18 December 1877. His father, a brewer, died when the boy was ten. He was apprenticed to a house painter, went to the university at twenty, and then turned to glass painting. The firm Ballantine and Allan won the public competition for the windows of the House of Lords. His Treatise of Stained Glass of 1845 became a standard work. His son Alexander, born in 1841, later joined the business. He also wrote the novel The Gaberlunzie’s Wallet in 1842. Other glass of his includes the main hall at Dunoon Burgh Hall and St John’s Kirk in Perth.

After the reopening in 1857, Robert Lee (minister) began what was called the Greyfriars Revolution. He introduced a service book of his own, standing for praise, kneeling for prayer, and prepared prayers. These were new in Scottish Presbyterianism. Under pressure from the General Assembly he stopped for a time, then resumed prepared prayers. A harmonium was installed against the west wall of Old Greyfriars in 1863, the first successful organ in a Church of Scotland building, and a two-manual pipe organ by D. and T. Hamilton of Edinburgh replaced it in 1865. He died in 1868 before further action could be taken. The kirk’s own history says that if he had not had a stroke and been badly hurt in a fall from his horse in 1867, he would have been called to the bar of the Assembly and tried as an innovator, and that he died the next year. Pipe organs, stained glass, prepared prayers, and standing for praise became common in the decades after his death. His changes led to the Church Service Society, whose library is kept in the kirk. The Hamilton organ was rebuilt to three manuals in 1883 by Brindley and Foster of Sheffield and, after the union, was given in 1932 to St Columba’s Church at Blackhall. A separate three-manual Hamilton organ, made in 1866 for Park Parish Church in Glasgow, was installed against the east wall of New Greyfriars in 1899, overhauled in 1901 by Charles and Frederick Hamilton, rebuilt in the north-west gallery by Gray and Davison of London in 1938, overhauled by H. Hilsdon of Glasgow in 1960, and scrapped in 1990.

Herbert Honeyman reordered the interior of Old Greyfriars in 1912. His dais, oak wainscot, and communion table remain at the east end. Bronze panels on the table show the symbols of the four Evangelists and an evangelist at work. The canopy of the wainscot includes the wounds of Christ. A gilt cross was added to the central panel in 1963, given by the City of Edinburgh (Fortress) Royal Engineers. George Hay altered the table and wainscot in 1971. Honeyman’s Jacobean canopied pulpit carries the arms of Scotland, of Edinburgh, and of the university. In 1951 George Hay altered it and moved it from the first pillar on the south side to the third, the place of the first pulpit. The church has brass and oak eagle lecterns. The oak one dates from 1893 and came from Lady Yester’s Kirk. William Moir Bryce brought the font from Rome in 1912. It is thought to be early Renaissance.

The congregations of Old and New Greyfriars united in 1929. William Wallace Dunlop Gardiner, the last minister of New Greyfriars, became the first minister of the united charge. Between 1931 and 1938, the tercentenary years of the Covenant in the kirk’s own telling, Henry Kerr restored the whole building. The architectural account dates the same campaign from 1932 to 1938 and gives him as Henry F. Kerr. He took down the wall between the two congregations, rebuilt the arcade in the eastern four bays, kept a plaster vault over the two western bays, and divided those bays from the rest by a lateral arch. Over the six original bays he put a barrelled ceiling of California redwood, also called Californian redwood. Bosses where the arches cross the long rib show the emblems of St Andrew, St Margaret, and each person of the Trinity, and the kirk’s own account adds bosses with the saltire and key dates. The woodwork of New Greyfriars was reused as a gallery under the western arch. In 1989 that gallery was replaced by an organ loft reached by a stair made from redundant pitch-pine pews. Kerr replaced Cousin’s single steep roof over the eastern half with a two-stage roof continuous with the west, and he put the pediment back on the east gable. Much of the interior as it is now dates from 1938. Pitch-pine pews of that restoration were replaced by chairs in 1989. The kirk’s own history says that most of the pews were removed at the same time as the present organ, so that the floor could be used for concerts as well as worship.

The present three-manual organ stands at the west end. The listing dates it to Peter Collins in 1988. Another account says Peter Collins of Melton Mowbray built it and that it was installed in 1989. The kirk’s own history says it was built in 1990 to replace a Hamilton organ in the north-west corner, and a congregational newsletter of January 2024 also places the installation in 1990. It has almost 3,400 pipes, also given as nearly 3,400, in tall cases with trumpets en chamade. Derek Riley carved Scottish plants and animals, a Franciscan friar, and Greyfriars Bobby on the cases. Along the frieze of the towers runs the penultimate phrase of Psalm 150, cut as “Laudate Dominum onme quod spirat,” which the kirk translates as “Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.” A chamber organ in the north aisle was built about 1845 by David Hamilton of Edinburgh and bought in 1968.

In 1938 the congregation of Lady Yester’s Kirk united with Greyfriars, and the congregation of the New North Church joined in 1941. The seventeenth-century monument to Margaret, Lady Yester, was brought from Lady Yester’s in 1938 and set on the south wall. It is an Artisan Mannerist aedicule, painted and gilded, with emblems of mortality. Her headstone was found in 1951 during excavations in Tweeddale Court, off the High Street. The communion table of the New North stands at the east end of the north aisle, and the table of New Greyfriars stands at the east end of the south aisle. Furnishings in the western part of the south aisle came from the St John’s chapel of the Highland church. John Hutchison made the marble memorial to Robert Lee on the north wall in 1870, with a relief portrait, and a plaque to William Robertson in 1883. A stone tablet to Robert Adam, made to one of Adam’s designs, was installed in 1992. Plaques also remember Thomas Ruddiman, Robert Wallace, Alexander Nisbet, and Walter Scott.

Further west on the south aisle, the St John the Baptist window was moved in 1979 from Highland, Tolbooth, St John’s, where David Young Cameron had given it in 1945 in memory of St John’s Church. Next to it, a window by Marjorie Kemp for Helen Pearl Gardiner shows St Helen and St Margaret. The central west window, the morning of the Resurrection, is by Ballantine and Gardiner and dates from 1898. A millennium window, an abstract Celtic cross by Douglas Hogg, was added in 2000. A flag of the United States hangs in the north aisle, given in 1970 by the consul general of the United States to mark the 350th anniversaries of the landing at Plymouth and of the opening of Greyfriars.

On 28 February 1979 the congregation of Highland, Tolbooth, St John’s united with Greyfriars. Both buildings were used at first. In 1981 it was decided to use only Greyfriars. Since that union the kirk has kept the Highland congregation’s Gaelic services. A Gaelic service is held every Sunday at 12.30 in the afternoon in the St John’s aisle. Since the death of Ewen Maclean in 2000, an ecumenical rota of ministers and preachers has led it, with unaccompanied psalms. The kirk also holds an annual Highland lecture and a Gaelic service during the General Assembly. Gaelic worship in Edinburgh began in 1704, when the Assembly provided for Gaelic-speaking soldiers in the castle. The first Gaelic chapel opened in Castle Wynd in 1769. The congregation united with a chapel of ease in Horse Wynd, now Chambers Street, in 1815 and became a parish quoad sacra in 1834. In 1875, then called St Oran’s, it moved to the former Catholic Apostolic church in Broughton. In 1948 it united with St Columba’s, founded as a Free Church congregation in 1843, on Cambridge Street in Tollcross. In 1956 it united with Tolbooth St John’s.

A church museum was developed in a room in the western part of the building during the 1990s and refurbished in 2012. It shows an original copy of the National Covenant, Robert Traill’s sword, and an 1867 portrait of Greyfriars Bobby by John Macleod. In 2013 Kirk o’ Field parish church united with Greyfriars, and the congregation took the name Greyfriars Kirk again. Since 2016 the Kirk o’ Field buildings, and the St Ninian’s Centre on the Pleasance, have been used as the Greyfriars Charteris Centre, named for Archibald Charteris. The centre offers halls to the local community.

Archibald Charteris, Archibald Hamilton Charteris, was born on 13 December 1835 at Wamphray in Dumfriesshire and died on 24 April 1908. He was the eldest son of the parish schoolmaster John Charteris and of Jean Hamilton. He graduated master of arts at Edinburgh in 1854 and studied further at Tübingen and Bonn, the Edinburgh account of his studies spelling the first of those towns Tubingen. He was ordained in 1858 to St Quivox in Ayrshire, moved in 1859 to New Abbey and then to Glasgow, and from 1868 until ill health forced his retirement in 1898 he was professor of Biblical criticism at Edinburgh. He was moderator in 1892, founded the Deaconess Hospital in Edinburgh in 1894, and is credited as the father of the Woman’s Guild and the founder of the magazine Life and Work.

Alison Elliot, Alison Janet Elliot, was born in Edinburgh on 27 November 1948. She is a psychologist, an elder, and session clerk at Greyfriars, and an honorary fellow of New College. She was educated at Bathgate Academy, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Sussex. She lectured in psychology at Lancaster from 1974 to 1976 and at Edinburgh from 1977 to 1985, and she wrote Child Language in 1981 and The Miraculous Everyday in 2005. She convened the Committee on Church and Nation from 1996 to 2000. She was elected in 2003 to serve as moderator of the 2004 General Assembly, and in 2004 she became the first woman to hold that office. She was also the first lay person to hold it since George Buchanan in 1567.

George Buchanan, in Gaelic Seòras Bochanan, was born in February 1506 and died on 28 September 1582. He was a historian and humanist. His De Jure Regni apud Scotos, published in 1579, argued that political power comes from the people, that a king is bound by the conditions on which power was given, and that it is lawful to resist and even to punish tyrants. James VI suppressed the work. It was condemned by the Treason Act of 1584 and was burned at Oxford in 1664 and in 1683. He is among the notable people buried at Greyfriars. The yard was regarded as Edinburgh’s principal cemetery. Others buried there include James Douglas, Regent Morton, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, Allan Ramsay the elder, John Kay, Sir Robert Sibbald, Joseph Black, William Robertson, William Adam, the Gaelic poet Duncan Ban Macintyre in 1812 under an obelisk with a targe and a stag’s head, and Henry Mackenzie. A window in the kirk also remembers George Buchanan.

Greyfriars Bobby was a Skye terrier or a Dandie Dinmont terrier, born in 1855 or 1856, who died on 14 January 1872. The well-known story is that he belonged to John Gray, a nightwatchman of the Edinburgh City Police, and that after Gray was buried in the kirkyard the dog spent the rest of his life on the grave, a watch of fourteen years. In 1867 the lord provost, Sir William Chambers, who was also a director of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, paid for the dog’s licence and gave him a collar, now in the Museum of Edinburgh. A necropsy by Professor Thomas Walley of the Edinburgh Veterinary College found that he had died of cancer. The accuracy of the story is disputed. The 1867 portrait in the kirk and the carving on the organ case keep the dog’s name on the building.

The churchyard is a burial ground from 1562, with monuments from the Artisan Mannerist monument of George Heriot the elder, of 1610, by Richard Doby, dean of guild from 1610 to 1612, to the neoclassical enclosure of Joseph Black of 1805. Burials were controlled by the town council, and until the eighteenth century they were restricted to wall monuments along the boundary. On the east wall, the Heriot monument has a basket-arched recess and symbols of death. The Naismith monument of 1614 has a figure of Naismith sitting up in his coffin. The Harlay monument of 1617 is probably by David Aikenhead, dean of guild from 1613 to 1620. The Dennistoun monument of 1626 has strapwork and a horse’s head in a broken pediment. The Mylne monument of Robert Mylne, 1674, has a Corinthian aedicule and cast-iron railings of 1779.

On the north wall, the Bayne of Pitcairlie enclosure and mausoleum of 1684 to 1685 has a rubble wall, an ogival stone roof, a swagged urn, and a statue of Bayne in a long cloak in the south niche. The Trotter mausoleum, by Robert and William Mylne, of 1709 to 1710, is a small pitched-roof building. On the west wall, the Byres of Coates monument of 1629 is by William Wallace. The Bannatyne monument of 1635 has twisted Corinthian columns and a relief of a cherub, an hourglass, a skull, and a view of Edinburgh. The Foulis of Ravelston monument of 1636 is by William Aytoun, the designation spelling his first name Wiliam. Headless figures of Religion and Justice stand on sarcophagi, and portrait busts are linked by clasped hands. The McMath monument of 1674 has barley-sugar columns. The William Robertson mausoleum of 1793 is a square ashlar building with a stone dome. The Adam mausoleum, by John Adam in 1750, has a conical stone roof, bucrania, and marble inscription panels of 1827.

The long narrow ground to the south-west is known as the Covenanters’ Prison. It is entered by a broken-pedimented gateway, bounded on the west by the east wall of Heriot’s Hospital and on the south by a stretch of the Telfer Wall. In 1739 the Charity Workhouse was built in the south-east of this area. A narrow strip between the workhouse and the hospital became part of the churchyard, marked as new burying ground on Kincaid’s map of 1784. In 1798 the yard was extended west beyond the Flodden Wall, with a new wall against Heriot’s Hospital. Enclosures here include the McLurg enclosure of 1717, the Dalrymple enclosure of 1781 by William Jameson, the Innes enclosure of the early nineteenth century, and the Joseph Black enclosure of 1805, whose inscription panel was replaced in 1894. On the south wall, the mausoleum of George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, by James Smith in 1691, is a stone-domed circular temple based on Bramante’s Tempietto, and the interior was restored by Rowand Anderson in 1892. The Little of Liberton mausoleum of 1680 to 1683 has a Corinthian peristyle, an ogival stone roof, and a recumbent effigy.

The lodge, gatepiers, gates, railings, and walls date from 1840. The lodge is a single storey with semi-octagonal ends, a piend roof, and lozenge-paned windows. Obelisk-topped ashlar gatepiers carry cast-iron gates and a wrought-iron arch. A key-blocked round-arched gateway passes through the Flodden Wall into the west enclosure. A graveyard inventory counts 590 gravestones, the earliest about 1616 and the most recent about 1900. The yard is closed for burials but maintained. Its area is given as 1.71 hectares, or 4.22 acres, with extensions of 0.19 hectares, or 0.46 acres, and 0.27 hectares, or 0.68 acres.

The bell hangs in a bracketed wooden shelter on the north porch. It was made in the 1860s for St Paul’s Church at Waterhouses in County Durham and was given to Greyfriars in 1991 by Nancy Bryson. The listing also dates the hanging of the bell to 1991. From 1640 the bell of the Magdalen Chapel tolled for services at Greyfriars. The first bell of the kirk itself was taken from the Tron Kirk in 1684 and hung in the west tower. It was removed in 1690 and replaced in 1691 by a bell of the Meikle family of Edinburgh founders. That bell was destroyed with the tower in 1718. The plate includes four communion cups, two dated 1633 and two dated 1644, four cups given to Lady Yester’s by the minister Thomas Wilkie in 1708, and a laver and baptismal basin of Old Greyfriars made in 1649 and renewed in 1707. Pewter alms dishes of 1703 and 1711 came from Lady Yester’s, with another of 1733 from Greyfriars, and there are pewter plates and flagons. Two silver cups are dated 1642 and two 1643. Cups of 1775 came from the Highland congregation, and plates of 1717 from the Tolbooth Kirk.

Outside the walls, excavation has been limited because the ground is full of burials. In 1996 a small quantity of human bone was found in a sewer trench running north from the north wall of the kirk. The bones had been put back into the fill of an earlier modern service trench under the north edge of the path. The city council sponsored that work, recorded by D. Henderson. In February 2003 S. Mitchell watched service trenches in the churchyard of Greyfriars Tolbooth and Highland Kirk. Human bone was found both in disturbed ground and in undisturbed burials cut into the subsoil. Twenty discrete groups represented a minimum of 29 people. Coffin handles, wood, and nails were recovered. A stone culvert was uncovered, and its line suggests it was once the main sewer from the church toward Candlemaker Row. The bones were to be reinterred. The architects Fouin and Bell sponsored the work for the kirk.

On the Kirkhouse site in Candlemaker Row, an evaluation on 16 and 17 June 2010, following earlier work in 2005, found the cellar of a tenement largely demolished in the middle of the twentieth century. Under the footprint of warehouses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were two medieval features, a large pit and a possible ditch. Both held White Gritty Ware of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries and charred grain of oat, hulled barley, and club or bread wheat. Sherds of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries came from a deep deposit in an engineering test pit toward the north-west corner. That site is the Kirkhouse ground, not the floor of the kirk.

In May 2025 the Bayne mausoleum was repaired after buddleia had forced the canopy stones apart and let water into the carved work. The plants were removed, the joints were filled with lime mortar, and the masonry was covered with hessian. Students of stone conservation were shown the assessment and the work. The city’s bereavement service, the stone conservator Nic Boyes, and volunteers of the kirkyard took part. On 18 April 2026 volunteers, archaeologists, and conservators lifted the ledger stone inside the John Bayne of Pitcairlie enclosure, something not done in living memory. Photographs had shown the stone sinking for decades. Once the topsoil was cleared, the stone was found to have cracked. It was taken to Nic Boyes for repair away from the yard, to be returned later. No entrance to a vault was found. Burial activity was found. A later ground-penetrating radar survey is planned, and cleaning may recover carvings that can no longer be read. The work was supported by a heritage-fund grant and by the City of Edinburgh Council, as part of a project running from January 2026 to January 2029 that set out to test whether a seventeenth-century tomb in the yard contains a vault and to look for traces of its original paint.

Richard Frazer has been minister since 2003. He was ordained in 1986 and had been minister of St Machar’s Cathedral in Old Aberdeen. The main Sunday service is at 11 in the morning. Communion is monthly. A prayer service is held on Thursday at 1.10 in the afternoon. The mixed choir, not professional, sings at the Sunday service and is led by the organist and choirmaster Henry Wallace. Choral music at Greyfriars is traced to 1865, when Joseph Geoghegan, musical director from 1857 to 1883, founded the Greyfriars Choral Society. The minister is part of the chaplaincy of the University of Edinburgh, and the kirk holds services with the university chaplaincy.

Mission work outside the building goes back to the eighteenth century. New Greyfriars used the Gaelic chapel in Castle Wynd and in 1846 founded the Vennel Ragged School, one of the first in Edinburgh. In 1886 the congregation built the Robertson Memorial Mission in the Grassmarket. From 1835 Old Greyfriars rented the Magdalen Chapel as a preaching station for the poor of the Cowgate. Since 1982 the congregation has worked with the Grassmarket Mission on the Grassmarket Community Project, for people who are homeless or who live with physical or mental ill health. In 2002 Greyfriars, Augustine United Church, and St Columba’s-by-the-Castle agreed to keep a Christian presence together in the centre of the city. In 2006 that grouping was recognised as a local ecumenical partnership. They share services in Holy Week.

In April 2023 the presbytery of Edinburgh and West Lothian agreed a mission plan that included a union of St Cuthbert’s parish church and Greyfriars Kirk. A working group from both congregations has met monthly since the middle of 2023. A joint kirk session met in November 2023. A newsletter of January 2024 described Greyfriars as founded in 1620, the first church built in Edinburgh after the Reformation, the place where the National Covenant was signed in 1638, and a barracks from 1650 to 1653. It placed the gunpowder explosion in 1718, the fire in 1845, the reunion of the two congregations between the world wars, and the Peter Collins organ in 1990, when most of the pews were removed.

The exterior still shows the join of the two churches. A vertical crack in the wall and the differing lancet windows mark where the new work of the 1720s met the older bays. The north porch has two doors because it served two congregations. The east gable carries the 1614 stone, a round-arched window of five lancets, an oculus in the pediment, and the blocked round-arched doorway of the east church. The west gable is Dutch, with a low Renaissance semi-octagonal porch that was once the principal entrance. Buttresses between the bays, and diagonal buttresses at the corners, are capped by ball-topped obelisks. Most windows have had their sills lowered, and in three cases a doorway below was removed. The remains of the former south doorway can be seen in the third bay from the east on the south side. The western windows are simple lancets or clusters of lancets. One south window has three lights and intersecting tracery, and another has two lancets under a mandorla. Inside, the octagonal piers carry pointed arcades along eight bays, broken only by the lateral arch at the western two bays, whose aisles are now rooms and whose arch frames the organ loft.

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