Magus Muir Memorials (Archbishop Sharp Memorial & Five Covenanters Memorial)

Found via a Historic Environment Scotland full-text search for 'murdered'. James Sharp, Archbishop of St Andrews and a deeply controversial figure for his role in suppressing Presbyterian Covenanters after the Restoration, was ambushed on 2 May 1679 while travelling by coach from Edinburgh to St Andrews, by nine Covenanters led by David Hackston and his brother-in-law John Balfour of Kinloch, who had actually been lying in wait for the Sheriff of Cupar and diverted to Sharp when they learned his coach was passing. Sharp was stabbed repeatedly and then shot dead in front of his daughter Isabella; one attacker, James Russell, is recorded as telling him he was killed not from personal grudge but because he had 'betrayed the church as Judas'. In apparent retaliation, five Covenanters captured after the Battle of Bothwell Bridge two months later - Thomas Brown, James Wood, Andrew Sword, John Weddell and John Clyde, none of whom is recorded as having taken part in Sharp's killing itself - were executed at Magus Muir in November 1679 and buried on the spot; the site became a Covenanter martyrdom shrine in its own right. Of the actual killers, only David Hackston and Andrew Guillan were ever caught and executed. Both monuments were erected together in 1877 by local landowner John Whyte-Melville; the Covenanters' memorial replaced/renewed an existing marker, and the Sharp pyramid likewise renews a 17th-century stone already at the murder site. Both are Category C listed (Historic Environment Scotland/British Listed Buildings).