Corpse in a Car Park

Let’s consider some of the weird shit we might find on the ground in Edinburgh: a penny maybe, a KFC box, perhaps a few condom wrappers depending on what time The Hive shut that evening.

While digging up a car park in Edinburgh’s Old Town however, council builders managed to find a corpse. Yes, a corpse.

Luckily for Edinburgh’s police inquiry team, this corpse has actually been rotting away for over 700 years, and has been identified as the skeleton of a Medieval knight.

The guy, who unfortunately now is just a pile of bones, was found next to a stone slab which tells us he was apparently definitely posh, and definitely loaded. Reports say he’d just stopped off in Edinburgh for a spot of lunch at Ye Olde Baguette Express*, and got carried away with time.

The stone slab: the vintage ID card.

The discoveries were made by complete accident, when builders were smashing up the car park to make way for Edinburgh’s new ‘Centre for Carbon Innovation’, a building affiliated with Edinburgh University. The new building is apparently going to be the first historic building in the world to achieve ‘outstanding’ status for green efficiency, much to the disappointment of the knight beneath it, who was reportedly dead against the building ever being erected.

The excavation also uncovered the exact location of Blackfriars Monastery, founded by the King of Scotland in 1230, which was later destroyed in the Protestant Reformation over 300 years later.

The exact location of the Knight (the science bit).

Richard Lewis, Culture convener for Edinburgh Council told The Tab that the find is “one of the most significant and exciting archaeological discoveries for many years.”

Andy Kerr, a University of Edinburgh alumnus also told us that they want the “new buiding to play a key role in shaping Scotland’s future, as these historical buildings on this site did in their time.”

Can’t we put something a bit more exciting on top of it then? Like a haunted Carbon Emissions centre? Or a Subway?

We assume he looked something like this. Probably.

The Tab have been informed that apart from the Knight, who had apparently been campaigning for years against the building, all other historical figures involved are greatly (or gravely) excited about the centre being erected, as they feel their contribution to carbon dating is well and truly over.

*It might have been Ye Olde Starbucks, but sources conflict.