Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh

            Tom Riddle: a name that is nowhere to be seen. I had others in mind, too, but I gave up on those long ago. I look around me: tombstones that are green with lichen and the passage of centuries lie in every direction, offering both hope and disappointment. 

          It is an attractive spot. There is a carpet of lush green grass and many fine elm and birch trees, crooked and denuded, can be seen. A cobblestone path slopes gently downhill from the yellow-hued church towards Candlemaker Row (the street names in Edinburgh’s Old Town have a lot of charm). To the north Edinburgh Castle is visible atop its rocky perch, the Half Moon Battery resembling a massive grey stone drum from this angle. 

          This is Greyfriars Churchyard, which dates back to 1566. Strikingly elaborate tombs and mausoleums line the edges. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that these were “appallingly adorned”; no doubt he was referring to the skeletons, skulls and other symbols of death carved upon the stones. Monuments of historical interest abound. One of these is the death mask of George Buchanan, sixteenth-century historian and tutor to King James VI. The detail is tremendous: he has sagging pouches beneath his eyes, sunken cheeks, a prominent lower lip, and a drooping moustache. The Martyrs’ Monument marks a mass grave of Covenanters, religious dissenters executed in the seventeenth century. 

          Many come here to see the simple tombstone dedicated to Greyfriars Bobby, a local dog so devoted to his master that he pined for fourteen years at his grave. Part of the old city wall can also be seen, running through the cemetery. Built following the catastrophic defeat of the Scots by an English army at Flodden in 1513, it is one of the few remaining sections in Edinburgh. 

          I meet one of the volunteers who keep the grounds so spruce, a chatty and genial elderly man versed in the tales of Greyfriars and the Old Town. Hitler, he claims, spared Edinburgh Castle from bombing during World War Two because he wanted it for himself. He laments the behaviour of drunks and other hooligans who entertain themselves of an evening by pushing tombstones over. Last year alone, there were 24 such cases, he tells me. He points out one such supine headstone, which bears the name of Sir Walter Scott’s father. “It’s a sick society”, he says. In a place so full of history I find it hard to disagree. 

          At last, I find what I was searching for. Beyond the arch in the Flodden Wall, down a muddy slope, in a rain-soaked corner of the graveyard where the castle is hidden from view, are two matching slabs of stone. They are tall and commonplace, side by side on the wall. I hear the voices of children playing outside neighbouring George Heriot’s School, and the sun briefly breaks through the bleak sky to illuminate the inscriptions. It turns out the spelling’s different, but who cares? I have tracked down ‘Thomas Riddell Esq’, Harry Potter’s nemesis.