Are Arthur's Seat coffins a real thing or just part of a novel by Ian Rankin

A. Good question from HyperGary. Fans of Ian Rankin will, of course, know that the Arthur's Seat coffins get a mention in his novel The Falls, one of the Detective Inspector John Rebus series. A tiny coffin containing a doll is found at a murder victim's flat. Is there a link with the collection of tiny coffins at the Museum of Scotland < xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Q. And is there

A. I'm not giving the plot away - you'll have to find out for yourself.

Q. No - I mean is there a collection of tiny coffins at the Museum of Scotland

A. Ah - see what you mean. Yes. I expect you'd like to know how they got there

Q. Yep.

A. One day in July, 1836, five boys were hunting rabbits on Arthur's Seat, the huge rock formation to the east of Edinburgh that is pockmarked with caves and hollows. One of the boys wandered into a cave and found a heap of slates, carefully arranged. Beneath it was 17 coffins, each four inches long, each containing a small wooden figure in custom-made clothes.

Q. What sort of figures

A. There were two tiers of eight coffins, and a third tier had only one. The lower coffins were decayed, showing that they were probably placed there singly over intervals of time. Each figure had a carved face, had boots painted on in black and was wrapped in coloured cloth.

Q. Any theory about why they were there

A. They caused a sensation in the Scottish Presbyterian imagination. The immediate theory was that they were tools in some form of black magic. Contemporary newspapers described the 'tomb' as a 'Satanic spell manufactory' and suggested a coven of witches had 'worked these spells of death by entombing the likenesses of those they wish to destroy'. Others wondered if the coffins were props in a travelling stage show, buried on the hill as a prank. Or perhaps the figures were carried by sailors to ward off misfortune, then buried at the end of a successful voyage.

Q. And what happened to them

A. A private collector bought them and in 1901 they were acquired by the Museum of Scotland, where three of them can now be viewed as part of the Heaven and Hell exhibition.

Q. Only three

A. Nine crumbled soon after acquisition. A curator explained: 'It's a shame that so many are now lost, but a number were left on the cave floor, soaked in mud. Only the ones that were stored higher up have survived.'

Q. Will we get any nearer to solving the mystery

A. There is one theory that fits the bill. An American academic commissioned to study the coffins concluded the most likely explanation was that they had been made by a shoemaker who knew the grave robbers Burke and Hare (click here for an Answerbank feature about that gruesome pair).

Q. Why

A. Each coffin was shaped from a single piece of wood using a shoemaker's knife, and the brass fittings were adapted from shoe buckles. Perhaps this cobbler provided a surrogate burial for those who had been disinterred by Burke and Hare - and dissected by anatomists. The number of coffins matched the number of corpses that the bodysnatchers provided.

Q. But why so much trouble

A. Religious thinking then was that you couldn't be resurrected if your body had been destroyed by dissection. Perhaps this acquaintance of Burke and Hare wanted to give the victims a Christian burial.

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by Steve Cunningham