An echo of the bodysnatchers.

This circular two-storey, harled rubble watch-house with a conical slated roof can be found in the kirkyard at Banchory-Ternan on Royal Deeside. I was built in about 1830 to act a shelter for people protecting newly buried corpses against the depredations of body snatchers. It has a fireplace with chimney to keep the watchers warm, a bell with which to summon help, and a gun-loop in one of the windows through which to take pot-shots with a musket at any grave-robbers.

Prior to 1832 the only legal source of bodies for anatomical dissection in Britain was that of criminals executed for murder. Unfortunately, for the anatomists of the time, the supply of such bodies was very limited. With the growth of medical teaching in the 18th century, universities and private anatomy schools required ever-greater numbers of cadavers for study and grave robbing became by far the most significant source of bodies. The earliest grave robbers were the surgeon-anatomists themselves, or their pupils, but later on professional body snatchers provided several thousand bodies annually. The urgent need to stop the grave robbers led to the Anatomy Act of 1832, which allowed the dissection of anyone dying in a hospital or workhouse who had no relatives to bury them, or whose relatives were too poor to do so. The 1832 Act also allowed people to leave their bodies to medical science, effectively providing medical schools with sufficient corpses for teaching purposes. Grave-robbing effectively ended soon after.
Not surprisingly, grave robbing was a practice that was generally frowned upon by society. Across Scotland, as elsewhere in Britain, parishes near to University anatomy schools used a variety of means to protect new graves from the body-snatchers, in particular watch-houses, mort-safes and mort-houses. Watch-houses, looking like small cottages with windows overlooking the kirkyard, can be seen at the edges of old churchyards across Scotland. Today, they are either derelict or used for storage but in the 18th and early 19th century, they were regularly used by grieving relatives to watch over a grave until its occupant was of no use to the anatomists. Watch-houses usually had a small fireplace for the comfort of watchers during the long wintry nights. Mort-safes were devices designed to physically prevent body snatchers from obtaining the corpse. At their simplest they were a large and very heavy stone placed over the grave or coffin. More complex versions took the form of an iron-grille that was placed over the grave, or a cast iron 'over-coffin' or cage, into which the wooden coffin was placed, and then buried. This could then be retrieved after a suitable period of time had elapsed. Mort-houses were solidly built vaults, with massive walls and heavy wooden and metal doors. Bodies were stored in these impregnable buildings until so decomposed as to be of no interest to the anatomists and were then retrieved and buried in the usual way.