Old Calton Cemetery

This guide to Old Calton Cemetery in Edinburgh centers on the Political Martyrs' Monument, an 1844 obelisk raised for five reformers convicted of sedition in the 1790s simply for arguing that ordinary men should get a vote. You'll hear who Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, Maurice Margarot, and Joseph Gerrald were, and how their sentence sent each of them to the far side of the world. Radical politician Joseph Hume laid the monument's foundation stone before a crowd of three thousand in 1844.