send not to know for whom the bell tolls..

1568. Perpetuated by the cramped and squalid conditions in the Old Town of Edinburgh, the city's teeming rat population spread the Great Plague.

The paucity of preventative sanitation or medical remedy to counter the epidemic, caused outbreaks of serious illness and mortality amongst the tenants of these unclean streets and closes.

The Bruntsfield Links were a plague pit - where infected bodies were buried as quickly as possible

It's not too clear but there is a bell pit here I am told. I can't find any evidence on a quick trawl. But I have been told (by whom I wonder) that there was a foundry near here, and that this was the pit in which the bell was cast.