The Mort-House

Today is Hallows' Eve, or Halloween, a celebration observed on the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows' Day. It begins the three-day observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including the saints (hallows), the martyrs, and all the faithful departed.
Just the day to visit a graveyard! Thus, late this afternoon, returning from the airport where we had dropped off a friend, we found ourselves in the old graveyard at hatton of Fintray, in the company of the Grim Reaper!
The building that you can see in the background is a mort-house, an exceedingly solidly built, windowless vault, with massive walls and heavy wooden and metal doors, built to protect the dead from the 19th Century bodysnatchers and anatomists. 
Mort-houses are to be found mainly in the North-East of Scotland, stretching from Crail in the South to Marnock in the North. (The Irish built similar structures but referred to them as corpse-houses). Bodies were stored on shelves  in the mort-house until too decomposed to be of interest to the anatomists and were then retrieved and buried in the usual way.  
The inauguration of the Fintray vault took place in July 1830 following a local farmer’s funeral. It must have been a great shock to the community when later that night he was successfully snatched from the locked vault and his headless corpse found next day in a sack, 3 miles away at Cothall on the road to Aberdeen.  
Back to normality to morrow!