Grassmarket Square

This guide to Grassmarket Square in Edinburgh tells the story of Maggie Dickson, a fishwife who worked this market floor before a 1724 conviction over a stillborn child sent her to the gallows here, watched by the traders and drovers she sold to every day. A doctor pronounced her dead and her coffin was loaded onto a cart bound for Musselburgh. Back then the square doubled as Edinburgh's working market floor, with drovers herding cattle in along two roads into the city.