Arthur's Seat Bone Pile Mystery: 800 Animal Bones, One Painted, and a Horse From About 1811

Edinburgh already has Burke and Hare and the tiny coffins of Arthur’s Seat. It now has a third entry for the ghost-tour script: someone spent years hauling animal bones up a hill, and nobody knows why.

What was found

After a wildfire burned across Holyrood Park in August 2025, park rangers on a routine patrol found a pile of animal bones on Crow Hill, just east of Arthur’s Seat, the BBC reported at the time. Historic Environment Scotland (HES) has now published what the analysis found, and it is stranger than anyone expected.

The pile weighed over 13 kilograms and held more than 800 fragments, HES says. The list of animals reads like a farm, a pet shop and a nature reserve combined: cattle, horse, pig, sheep or goat, cat, rabbit, red deer, weasel and bird. No human bones were found, which is the one bit of good news in the whole story.

The bones were sitting on the surface, not buried. HES says they had probably always been there, hidden by plants until the fire cleared them.

The arts and crafts section

This is not a normal pile of leftovers. One small mammal bone has painted stripes, two black bands with a white one in between. A sheep or goat thigh bone carries red pigment that looks like a thumb or fingerprint. A horse or pony leg bone has an unusually large hole, and a pig bone has a hole drilled through one end. HES says the work “might have been efforts to create some kind of artefact.”

More than 13% of the bones show butchery marks, most of them made by a modern electric saw. Two bones have limpet shells stuck to them, so they spent a long time in the sea. Others show gnaw marks. HES’s verdict is that whoever left them was collecting from “the sea, chance finds and maybe even their local butcher!”

The dates

Radiocarbon dating was supposed to settle it. Instead, the horse or pony bone came back at about 1811, which suggests someone kept an old skeleton for a long time before taking it for a walk. The cat bone dates from after 1950. HES has concluded the collection is “not archaeologically significant.” It also says it “remains no less intriguing.”

The Snark take

HES lists the suspects: a lone collector, a group of friends, an artist, or “a practitioner of an unusual hobby or ritual.” The site sits in one of the most archaeologically rich parks in Scotland, a scheduled monument with 7,000 years of human use. Its newest find is a modern person with a saw and a beach habit.

Crow Hill is not a place you casually carry a bag of bones to, as HES points out. Someone picked it on purpose. They may be reading this. If so, Edinburgh has questions.