St Giles Church
Facing us is St. Giles' Church, whose walls have witnessed some memorable scenes, e.g., the preaching of John Knox, and the uproar of 1637, caused by the attempt to introduce Laud's Liturgy.
Tradition says that the heroine of the latter occasion was a person named Jenny Geddes, who, when the Dean of Edinburgh began to read from the obnoxious Service Book, flung a stool (the furniture kind!) at him.
The oldest portion of the church dates from 1359, but little of the original fabric remains.
In St. Giles' are buried the Good Regent Moray and the great Marquis of Montrose Knox was interred in the churchyard which lay to the south. This "God's acre" has long disappeared, but the supposed site of the Reformer's grave, in what is now Parliament Square, is marked with his initials and the date of his death.
At the south-east corner of St. Giles' is the ornate Chapel of the Order of the designs by Sir Robert Lorimer.
