Why people spit on the Heart of Midlothian on Edinburgh's Royal Mile

A heart where a prison stood

The heart is in the pavement, right by the north-west corner of St Giles. It doesn't commemorate a love affair or a miracle. It marks the spot where the Old Tolbooth stood: the town's old prison.

And this was no discreet jail tucked away in a courtyard. It stood in the middle of the High Street itself. Robert Chambers, who gathered up the memories of Edinburgh's old folk in the nineteenth century, put it plainly: "the jail was a narrow building, half-filling up the breadth of the street". According to another Victorian chronicler, James Grant, the High Street beside it shrank to just fourteen feet. That's barely four metres for a whole city to squeeze through, carts and all.

People called the prison the Heart of Midlothian. Midlothian was the old county around Edinburgh, so the nickname meant something like "the heart of the county". A touch ironic, for a building nobody wanted to go into.

Taxes, parliaments and cells

It wasn't always just a prison. "Tolbooth" means, more or less, a tax-house. According to Grant, the Scottish Parliament met there in the fifteenth century, in that building or the one before it on the same site, and Scotland's top judges sat there until 1561. Taxing, law-making, judging and locking people up: the town did nearly all of it on one spot.

All around, trade made use of every inch. Facing St Giles stood a row of houses and shops known as the Luckenbooths (from "lucken", meaning locked), and against the walls of the church were tiny booths called krames. Chambers was told of a glover named Kennedy who, with his wife, kept one measuring seven feet by three for years, without ever having a fire. Not even room to try on a glove.

The prison was a stage, too. From 1785 there was a platform for public executions at its western end. That's where, on 1 October 1788, they hanged William Brodie, the respectable deacon of the carpenters and town councillor who burgled houses by night. The papers at the time said he'd died on a gallows of his own design. The town council's records say otherwise. Brodie sat on the committee that ordered it, but it was another carpenter, Deacon Hill, who built the platform, and the drop had already made its debut at Newgate prison in London. A perfect headline. And not true.

Nor was it a well-loved building. In 1736 an organised crowd burned down its door to drag out John Porteous, a captain of the guard who'd fired on people at a hanging and had been granted a temporary reprieve from London. They hanged him in the Grassmarket.

The demolition, the door and a bird

The prison was pulled down in 1817. Its stones went into the sewers. Its doorway, door and lock went to Abbotsford, Walter Scott's country house, where he built them into the mansion. Scott himself wrote in 1829 that a tomtit had built her nest inside that very lock. After so many prisoners, the last tenant was a bird.

Scott did one more thing for the old jail. In 1818, the year after it came down, he published his novel The Heart of Mid-Lothian. The book made the nickname famous, and the heart in the street inherited it. One of the city's football clubs carries the name as well, but that's another story.

So why do people spit?

Here's the honest part. Spitting on the heart is a living custom, and the local press has written about it: plenty of people do it for luck. The usual explanation is that it wasn't always that way. The gesture is said to have started as a sign of contempt for the prison and all it stood for, and only later turned into a good-luck charm.

It fits everything above, but we haven't found a single document that says when the custom began or who spat first. Nor have we found a reliable source that dates the mosaic. So the sensible thing is to tell it for what it is: a living tradition whose origin is believed, not known.

Do you have to spit to get the story? Not at all. Look down at the heart, look up at the corner of the cathedral, and picture a building in the middle of the street that blocked out nearly everything.

Fact or legend.

• Fact: the heart marks the site of the Old Tolbooth, a prison that took up half the street. It was pulled down in 1817 and its door ended up in Walter Scott's house.
• Fact: the prison was nicknamed the Heart of Midlothian, and Scott's 1818 novel made the name famous.
• Today's custom: spitting on the heart, nowadays for luck.
• Claimed origin: that the custom began as contempt for the prison. It's the explanation you'll hear most, but nobody has dated it.
• False: that Brodie died on a gallows he invented.
• No reliable evidence: the date of the mosaic.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on its free route, "The Royal Mile, from the Castle to St Giles". The stop "Heart of Midlothian and the Old Tolbooth" is heard right beside the heart, and the next one, "The gallows Brodie didn't invent", finishes the tale of the thieving councillor on that same platform. Eleven stories, all downhill from the Castle Esplanade, and all free.

Further reading

• Rachel Mackie, "Heart of Midlothian: Why do people spit on the iconic spot…?", Edinburgh Evening News, 2022. https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/crime/heart-of-midlothian-why-do-people-spit-on-the-iconic-spot-in-edinburgh-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-the-old-tolbooth-3811300
• James Grant, Cassell's Old and New Edinburgh, vol. 1, Cassell, London, c. 1881–1883 (chapter "Memorials of the Heart of Midlothian, or Old Tolbooth"). https://archive.org/details/cassellsoldnewed01gran
• Robert Chambers, Traditions of Edinburgh, revised edition of 1868 (W. & R. Chambers, 1912). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61314
• William Roughead (ed.), Trial of Deacon Brodie, William Hodge, Edinburgh, 1906. https://archive.org/details/trialofdeaconbro00rouguoft
• Walter Scott, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, 1818. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6944