Leith's 1645 plague outbreak is one of the grimmest, and best documented, chapters in the port town's history. It arrived in April of that year and, by the time it had run its course by the end of 1645, is estimated to have killed around half of Leith's population — an even higher death rate than Edinburgh itself suffered in the same outbreak, itself catastrophic enough to be remembered as the worst the city ever experienced. Roughly 3,000 people are thought to have died in Leith alone within those few months.
Ordinary parish burial grounds had no capacity for a death toll on that scale, and mass graves were dug at several points around the town, including sites now covered by Great Junction Street and Wellington Place, and at Leith Links, which has served as Leith's principal open green space for centuries and today is used for football, golf and general recreation with little outward sign of what lies beneath parts of it.
The clearest physical confirmation of this history came in 2016, when archaeologists from Wardell Armstrong, working ahead of building work at St Mary's (Leith) RC Primary School on the edge of the Links, excavated a mass grave containing 81 individuals, buried both with and without coffins. Analysis of the coffin timber gave a felling date consistent with around 1640, and the hasty, minimal construction of the coffins themselves was read by the archaeologists as further evidence of a burial carried out under the pressure of a genuine epidemic rather than in ordinary circumstances — a rare case where local plague tradition and hard archaeological evidence line up precisely.
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