Edinburgh’s History: 20 Places and the Stories Behind Them

1. Edinburgh Castle: a royal birth and a fortress rebuilt

The room associated with James VI’s birth is smaller than I ever picture it when I hear the story. Mary, Queen of Scots gave birth here in 1566. It was a family event with a great deal of government riding on it. The castle is full of that closeness between rooms somebody had to live in and decisions that could change a country.

For a much earlier royal connection, turn to St Margaret’s Chapel. David I built it around 1130 to honour his mother. It is Edinburgh’s oldest surviving building, but that does not mean everything inside it shares the same date. The decorated stone arches are early; the stained glass is later. During the sixteenth century the chapel served as a gunpowder store, and its medieval identity was recognised again in 1845. Its survival owes something to the unceremonious business of finding a use for an old room.

That habit of adaptation becomes easier to read at the Half Moon Battery. The defences wrap around the remains of David’s Tower, begun in 1367–68 and wrecked during the Lang Siege of 1571–73. The broken tower was incorporated into a new arrangement rather than entirely cleared away. The guns now on the battery date from 1810. I find this a good place to slow down: tower, battery and gun belong to different military circumstances, although a quick photograph can make them look like one piece of medieval fortification.

The Honours of Scotland reward the same attention to interruptions. Crown, sceptre and sword represented the authority of a separate Scottish monarchy. They were hidden between 1651 and 1660 during the threat from Cromwell’s forces, then locked away after the parliamentary Union of 1707. A party including Walter Scott opened the chest in 1818. These objects survived changes that profoundly altered what royal government meant; their history includes concealment and storage as well as ceremony.

I make time for the prison vaults for a different sort of mark. A prisoner scratched an early version of the Stars and Stripes into a door. French privateers and Americans captured during the War of Independence were among those held here. The rooms are arranged to suggest conditions around 1800. The scratch belongs to the people who actually passed their time below Crown Square.

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2. Holyroodhouse and Holyrood Abbey: royal ambition at the foot of the Mile

The Great Gallery gives the royal family quite a past. Its line of portraits includes legendary ancestors as well as historical monarchs. I enjoy seeing what a king wanted visitors to believe about his family. In the older tower you get much closer to the scale of a life at court.

The residence began beside Holyrood Abbey, founded by David I in 1128. Kings used accommodation in the abbey precinct before James IV developed a palace around his marriage to Margaret Tudor in 1503. James V subsequently built the great north-west tower. I like the way the construction history unsettles the apparent symmetry of the frontage: the corresponding tower on the other side belongs to a later attempt to make a complicated building look orderly. Matching appearances do not necessarily mean matching ages.

Mary, Queen of Scots’ apartments occupy the older tower. On 9 March 1566, men interrupted her supper with her secretary, David Rizzio, dragged him into the outer chamber and killed him. Her husband, Lord Darnley, supported the plot. The Royal Collection’s account of the murder explains the resentment of Rizzio’s influence and Darnley’s own ambitions. The supper room’s small dimensions matter. Access to a ruler could confer power through conversations held in quite intimate surroundings, and the struggle to control that access could become violent.

After fire damaged the palace in 1650, Charles II’s rebuilding of 1671–79, overseen by William Bruce, established much of its present form. Here access was organised more ceremonially. The route through the state apartments became increasingly exclusive as visitors approached the royal bedchamber. Read the sequence of doors alongside the ceilings and furnishings: how far someone could proceed told everyone something about that person’s standing. Decoration helped make the hierarchy convincing.

Charles Edward Stuart held court here for about six weeks in 1745. The ruined abbey has its own very different history, including the removal of its Protestant congregation under James VII in 1687. I’d give the two buildings separate time. A palace room can tell you who got close to a monarch. The abbey opens a question about what a monarch could ask of a congregation.

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3. St Giles’ Cathedral: the arguments that shaped a church

The bagpipe-playing angels are the ones I remember in St Giles’. You’ll find them in the Thistle Chapel, which is much later than the old church. I like looking for the scalloped capital in the St Eloi Aisle as well. That stone came from the twelfth-century church. Put those two details together and you have nearly the full distance this building has travelled.

John Knox’s ministry placed St Giles’ at the centre of the Scottish Reformation. In 1560 Parliament rejected papal authority and prohibited the Mass. Inside the church, altars and images were removed and valuable plate sold. The changes to worship altered how people used the space, with seating introduced for sermons that might last an hour. I find that practical detail particularly helpful. A theological argument had consequences for where people sat, what they looked at and how long they listened.

The attempt to introduce Charles I’s new prayer book in 1637 produced another confrontation. Disorder broke out during the service. Tradition gives Jenny Geddes a starring part, throwing a stool towards the dean, but the church’s assessment treats her precise involvement cautiously. I am happy to keep the story, provided we keep that qualification with it. The riot is established; the memorable individual action is less secure. Wider resistance to royal intervention in worship should not depend on whether one particular stool was thrown.

Nor was this always one open interior. By the end of the seventeenth century, stone partitions divided it between four congregations. Publisher and former Lord Provost William Chambers later backed its reunification, working with architect William Hay. Their nineteenth-century restoration culminated in 1883. Chambers saw the finished work before dying three days ahead of the reopening service. The restored church expressed a new decision about how the building should be understood and used.

The partitions used to make room for several congregations. Their removal changed the church again, and Robert Lorimer’s Thistle Chapel added a setting for a different kind of ceremony. It’s quite a thing to hear the story of a contested prayer book in an interior people have kept rearranging around the way they want to worship.

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4. Mary King’s Close: the working street beneath the City Chambers

There used to be sky above Mary King’s Close. That’s the thing I most want to keep hold of on the tour. The stairways belong to a street that ran down the hill from the High Street. The widow and fabric trader whose name it took was one of the people who had to make a living in it.

The attraction introduces Mary King as a seventeenth-century widow with four children who earned money through fabric trading and sewing. I welcome that attention to a working woman, but her address and the naming of the close need qualification. Stuart Harris’s research, preserved in Historic Environment Scotland’s national record, places a Mary King in the 1635 valuation roll on the High Street immediately west of the close’s entrance. Earlier records call it Alexander King’s Close; the Mary King form appears in 1694. The precise process by which it acquired her name remains uncertain. We cannot confidently attach her biography to one surviving room.

The 1645 plague brings other kinds of work into the story. George Rae served as a plague doctor, while Walter King was associated with the foul clengers who cleaned infected premises. Both are among the historical people interpreted by the attraction. Their duties help me think beyond a general picture of panic: sickness had to be managed by people undertaking dangerous work. The familiar claim that residents were sealed underground to contain the plague is wrong. The street remained open to the sky during the outbreak.

The Royal Exchange project came more than a century later. Construction in 1753–61 partly overlaid Mary King’s Close and neighbouring lanes, retaining older structures below a development intended for commerce and public business. Plans included customs facilities, shops and accommodation as well as an exchange. That mixture is worth keeping in mind when looking at the surviving walls. Some buildings were removed, others reused; what remains records practical decisions by later builders.

Older rooms stayed in use after the Exchange went up. The sawmaker Andrew Chesney left in 1897. The guided tour puts characters and scenes around the evidence. I like to use the actual fall of the ground to stay in touch with the street. People carried stock and water down here before the way above them was built over.

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5. Gladstone’s Land: the people who paid the rent

There’s a monkey in the painted ceiling at Gladstone’s Land. Once you’ve found it, try the duck and the stork. The date 1620 appears twice. The decorations make sense as something a landlord could use to draw tenants who could afford a fine room.

Thomas Gladstone bought the property in 1617 and extended it towards the street. The Trust’s history connects those decorated rooms with his efforts to attract prosperous tenants. To me, they are a landlord’s investment as well as an artistic achievement. A tenement could contain substantial households and successful businesses; poverty and overcrowding belong to particular phases of its occupation, rather than providing a permanent definition of the building type.

At street level, grocer John Riddoch sold wine, tobacco, herbs and imported spices. His will records ginger, saffron and cloves. These goods connected the Lawnmarket to distant supplies, and their uses extended beyond the kitchen. Belief that dangerous air spread disease encouraged customers to seek protection in aromatic ingredients. The historical remedies tell us about the customers’ fears and the grocer’s trade, without establishing that the products protected anyone from plague. I find the overlap revealing: one small shop dealt in appetite, status and hoped-for security.

The boarding-house keeper Eleanor Leake makes the later history harder to admire without qualification. Edinburgh Libraries’ research in contemporary newspapers follows her attempt to remain after accommodation was condemned in 1933. She was a widow of sixty-nine, had no pension and depended on rents. She asked for compensation or a council home; the court ordered her to leave. The Trust bought Gladstone’s Land in 1934 and saved it from demolition. The earlier proceedings show what the treatment of deteriorating housing could mean for someone whose income came from it.

I come back to the grocer’s ginger, saffron and cloves when I think of the painted animals. Both are things people in this street took trouble to obtain. Lower down, and much later, the building could offer a boarding-house bed on very different terms. Look at the staircase and imagine the range of people who had to make the same climb.

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6. Parliament Hall: where Scotland’s parliament sat before the Union

I tend to look up first in Parliament Hall. The oak roof is the piece of the seventeenth-century room that helps me picture a sitting. The glass is much later. Even a quick look at those two things gives you a building that outlasted one of its main purposes.

Scotland’s parliament had previously met in different places. As attendance grew, the accommodation at St Giles’ became inadequate. Edinburgh took on the provision of a permanent building in the 1630s, raising money through subscriptions and local taxation. The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland describe a project occupying part of the High Kirk’s burial ground. Government was finding room within an already crowded city, with local people helping pay for a national meeting place.

Sir James Murray, the king’s master of works, directed construction, completed around 1640. The complex accommodated royal administration and justice alongside parliament. Later work gave it a classical frontage and enlarged its surroundings, so the view from Parliament Square does not readily reveal the age of the hall. I particularly like one detail in the Scottish Courts’ account: an original entrance lintel was eventually installed above an entrance to the debating chamber in the modern Scottish Parliament. The connection between the two homes of parliament includes an actual piece of building material.

The Union of 1707 brought the separate Scottish Parliament to an end, with legislation thereafter conducted through the Parliament of Great Britain at Westminster. Scotland retained its own legal system and judicial institutions. That distinction within the settlement explains why lawyers and courts continued at Parliament House. A constitutional change altered the work done here without making the complex redundant.

Parliament was moved by plague and interrupted by war before the Union ended its separate sittings in 1707. The courts stayed. A print of a sitting around 1680 helps with the bits a roof can’t supply. What I like to picture is an ordinary day of business here, with people having to find enough room for themselves and whatever they’d come to argue.

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7. John Knox House: the preacher’s name and the goldsmith’s story

IM and MA are the letters I look for at John Knox House. They put James Mossman and Mariota Arres in the building before I have to decide what to make of the preacher’s name over the door. Mossman’s skill with precious metal belonged to a business that also handled credit.

Mossman worked for Mary, Queen of Scots. Goldsmiths could combine skilled manufacture with pawnbroking and moneylending, as the house’s room guide explains. Shop booths occupied the frontage, with working and domestic accommodation behind and above. I find it helpful to keep that mixed use in mind. Precious objects moved through a business that handled credit as well as craftsmanship, placing the owner within relationships that reached beyond his shop.

After Mary’s forced abdication, Mossman supported the men holding Edinburgh Castle in her cause. He minted coins bearing her image and helped raise money against jewels. His trade supplied practical support to a political allegiance. When the castle surrendered in 1573, he was executed at the Mercat Cross. Those initials therefore connect the house to the siege whose damage can still be read inside the Castle’s Half Moon Battery. The two sites tell parts of the same civil conflict from different positions.

The Knox association did, however, have a documented effect on the building’s later life. It helped protect the house from nineteenth-century demolition. The museum’s account of its preservation describes time capsules recording that campaign, one displayed in a window. A belief about who lived here influenced whether the house survived. That makes the association worth understanding even when it cannot be treated as a settled piece of sixteenth-century biography.

The Oak Room has a painted ceiling from about the beginning of the seventeenth century. It belongs to another life of the house. For me the initials are still the best way in. A preacher’s reputation helped the house survive, and two initials are enough to get the goldsmith and his household back into the story.

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8. Greyfriars Kirk and Kirkyard: the cost of a signature

I’ve never quite got over the idea of keeping gunpowder in a church tower. An explosion in 1718 took away the western end of Greyfriars. The rebuilt church had already seen a great deal of argument about what worship ought to look like.

Greyfriars takes its name from the grey habits of the Franciscan community that occupied the site before the Reformation. Mary, Queen of Scots later granted the ground to the town for burials. Work on a new parish church began in 1602, but it was not ready for its first worshippers until Christmas Day 1620. The kirk’s history follows the passage from a monastic site to a Protestant church that retained the earlier name.

On 28 February 1638, the National Covenant was signed here. Charles I’s new prayer book had been introduced without the approval of either the Scottish Parliament or the Kirk’s General Assembly. Its opponents feared changes that threatened their understanding of the Reformation. The signatories declared loyalty to the king while resisting his religious policies, a position that became increasingly difficult to maintain. Copies of the Covenant circulated across the country for signatures.

After the Restoration, conflict continued under Charles II. Following the defeat of a Covenanter army at Bothwell Bridge in 1679, captured men were held in the kirkyard’s Covenanters’ Prison. The Friends of Greyfriars give the number as 1,200. The Martyrs’ Monument commemorates persecution; George Mackenzie, associated with prosecuting Covenanters, also has his tomb here. Reading those memorials together tells us more. They preserve opposing positions within a small burial ground, rather than offering one uncontested account of the past.

There was another fire in 1845, after which Robert Lee pressed for changes including stained glass and instrumental music. I’d go between Greyfriars and St Giles’ for the history of what could be said or done in a Scottish church. The yard adds the much harder history of people made to pay for their allegiance.

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9. The Grassmarket: trade, punishment and a city in revolt

It takes a fair amount of space to bring animals into a town and sell them. That is how I first make sense of the long Grassmarket below the castle. A charter of 1477 provided for markets here. The same open ground could hold the crowd at a hanging.

At its eastern end, the low circular Covenanters’ Memorial records another use of that open ground. Unveiled in 1937, it commemorates people executed here during the seventeenth-century religious conflicts. It deserves a pause. Public punishment depended on being seen, and the marketplace gave authority a ready audience. Its memorial is modest enough to miss amid the surrounding activity.

In 1736, the hanging of the smuggler Andrew Wilson led to an extraordinary reversal of public authority. The City Guard opened fire on a disorderly crowd, killing several people. Its captain, John Porteous, was tried and condemned to death. Queen Caroline granted a reprieve; an angry crowd then broke into the Old Tolbooth, dragged him here and hanged him. The University of Edinburgh’s account connects the affair with resentment of intervention from London. The square that had supplied the setting for an official execution became the setting for a lynching.

The White Hart adds a different kind of continuity. Records of an inn here reach back to 1516, but the present tenement dates from about 1740. Keep those dates separate when reading any claim about its age. Coaches and wagons made it an important arrival point; damage during the Zeppelin raid of 1916 and restoration in the 1990s belong to its later history. An old establishment can continue through substantial changes to the building that houses it.

Walter Scott used the Porteous affair in The Heart of Mid-Lothian in 1818. The novel gave a very local crowd a long afterlife. From the memorial at the east end I find it easier to understand why the authorities wanted to hold a public punishment here, and how quickly a crowd of people could take charge of the space for itself.

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10. Museum of Edinburgh: the city in the things it kept

Greyfriars Bobby’s collar is the little thing I’d give a look to in the Museum of Edinburgh. The Lord Provost supplied it in 1867 when the dog needed a licence. I like the bit of municipal business sitting behind one of the city’s best-known stories. It sets you up rather well for a museum where the things people used can explain who had a say in the way Edinburgh worked.

Huntly’s connection is less certain than the name suggests. Historic Environment Scotland tentatively associates it with a short visit by the Marquis of Huntly in 1636. The Incorporation of Hammermen’s ownership is firmer: the craft organisation bought the property in 1647 and later engaged royal master mason Robert Mylne to extend it. I like the opportunity this gives us to consider the building as an expression of organised trades. An aristocratic visit may have supplied the lasting name; craftspeople also shaped the property.

The decorative-art collections continue that history. Silver coffee pots, communion vessels and candlesticks came from Edinburgh and Canongate makers. Longcase clocks, Scottish ceramics and cut glass represent other kinds of skilled production. These objects tell us about hospitality and religious practice through the work needed to supply them. Spend time on a piece whose use is clear, then consider its making: an everyday purpose can bring the quality of the material and workmanship into sharper focus.

James Craig’s New Town plans provide a different scale of design. His scheme was adopted after alterations in 1767. Its geometry and street names expressed an ordered urban future while honouring George III and his family. The city’s collection record helps explain those choices. Looking at a proposal on paper also encourages a useful question on the subsequent walk: how much of the celebrated plan took physical form, and what changed in the process?

The council acquired the building in 1924 and turned it into a museum between 1927 and 1932. Some fittings came from elsewhere. There is a history of choosing what to keep behind both the rooms and the objects inside them. The collar, with its date, gives you a very small piece of that job to get your eye in.

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11. The Writers’ Museum: how Edinburgh put its words to work

Burns’s proof-reading chair is the object I like to start with. He sat in it while correcting proofs in William Smellie’s printing office. It’s an ordinary kind of work to be able to picture somebody doing, and quite a change from thinking about Burns only as a name on a title page.

Lady Stair’s House was built in 1622 for the merchant Sir William Gray of Pittendrum. Lady Stair bought it around 1719. By the late nineteenth century it had deteriorated badly; Patrick Geddes persuaded Lord Rosebery to support restoration, and the building was given to the city as a museum in 1907. The house’s own history belongs alongside the collections. It is a rescued townhouse adapted to remember writers who lived and worked elsewhere, rather than a shared literary home preserved intact.

Burns did stay nearby, initially in Baxter’s Close off the Lawnmarket. He came to Edinburgh after the success of his Kilmarnock edition of 1786, arranging the Edinburgh edition published in 1787 and meeting people who could help bring it into print. The National Library’s account gives the visit a practical purpose. With that in mind, I find the chair a useful link between a poet’s words and the printers, publishers and supporters who helped circulate them.

The press used for the Waverley novels takes that connection into a much larger publishing business. Waverley appeared anonymously in 1814. Scott maintained the formal concealment for thirteen years, even arranging for manuscripts to be copied so his handwriting would not betray him. As the National Library explains, the secret became increasingly open. I enjoy the contrast between those elaborate precautions and the press: however discreet the author wished to be, his books needed conspicuous amounts of practical production.

Stevenson came from a family of lighthouse engineers and took his own route into writing. Outside, the paving stones in Makars’ Court keep adding writers’ words in Scots, Gaelic, Latin and English. I’d spend time there even on a short visit. After the chair and the press, there are the words people made all that effort to put in reach of readers.

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12. Surgeons’ Hall: the people medicine learned from, and those it shut out

There are two things I’d make room for at Surgeons’ Hall. One is what a surgeon could learn from an instrument or a specimen. The other is who was allowed to do the learning. It’s a strong pair of questions to take round a collection begun by a college founded in 1505.

The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh was founded in 1505. A call for material in 1699 helped establish a collection that grew substantially over the following centuries. During the nineteenth century, collections assembled by Charles Bell and John Barclay enlarged the museum, which opened to the public in 1832. The institution’s history explains how professional training developed into a museum. Today the displays connect surgery, dentistry and pathology. An instrument shows what someone could attempt; a specimen may show the condition they were trying to understand.

The demand for bodies acquired a criminal answer in 1828, when Burke and Hare murdered people and supplied their bodies to Robert Knox’s private anatomy school. Calling them simply grave robbers obscures what they did. Hare gave evidence against Burke, who was hanged on 28 January 1829 and dissected. His skeleton belongs to the University’s Anatomical Museum, a separate institution. Knox, who also served as curator of the surgeons’ museum, was never tried, although the scandal cost him that post. The University’s account distinguishes these events and locations.

Another part of the history concerns admission to the profession. The Edinburgh Seven entered the university in 1869 after Sophia Jex-Blake recruited other women to join her application. On 18 November 1870, a hostile crowd blocked them as they arrived at Surgeons’ Hall for an anatomy examination. They reached the room, but disruption continued, and they were eventually prevented from taking Edinburgh degrees. The commemorative plaque on Nicolson Street marks the confrontation. I find it a necessary companion to accounts of medical progress: access to learning could be defended as jealously as any professional privilege.

The museum’s statement on human remains acknowledges that many acquisitions predated modern consent standards and that not everyone represented gave informed consent. That acknowledgement changes how I read a specimen label. A body’s contribution to knowledge does not establish that the person agreed to make it. Nor does the presence of the Burke and Hare story explain the origin of every specimen. The collection contains different histories, and each needs care.

A medical collection can explain a very practical change to the way somebody was treated. I think it matters to give the people in the collections time as well. The museum addresses the origins of its human remains, and the Edinburgh Seven make it possible to name some of the people who had to fight to join the profession.

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13. The Georgian House: who made life upstairs possible?

A bell could link a comfortable room in Charlotte Square to someone carrying water or tending fires downstairs. I like having that small mechanism in mind on the pavement outside the Georgian House, particularly while the interior is closed. Robert Adam’s ordered frontage accommodated a great deal of activity that the street gives very little away about.

No. 7 was completed in 1796 and bought for £1,800 by John Lamont, eighteenth chief of his clan. Robert Adam’s 1791 design for the north side of Charlotte Square brought separate houses together behind a palace-like façade. I like the collective composition, which can be appreciated from the public pavement. It also makes me curious about the differences hidden behind the matching front doors: residents shared an architectural scheme without necessarily sharing the same circumstances.

The Trust’s interpretation of domestic service describes five to seven servants supporting the Lamont household. A housemaid tended fires, made beds, carried hot water upstairs and emptied chamber pots. Linen had to be made and mended; meals required shopping, preparation and cleaning. The bells identified which room needed attention. This is a useful measure of the house’s scale. Its spaciousness represented continuing demands on people who had to move through it repeatedly.

A documented neighbour adds an international dimension. UCL’s research into the legacies of British slavery identifies John Innes Crawford, an early resident of No. 6, as the inheritor of Bellfield sugar plantation in Jamaica and its enslaved workforce, numbering several hundred. That evidence belongs to Crawford at No. 6; it should not be transferred to the Lamonts at No. 7. It nevertheless changes how I read the square. The architecture alone cannot tell us what supported each household’s prosperity.

The present collection was assembled to recreate a period home. A coconut-shell punch ladle records a gift sent in 1790 by a doctor in St Kitts. It’s worth holding that small connection beside what is documented about John Innes Crawford, a neighbour whose wealth had links to slavery. Those are among the histories that reached the square with the people and objects it housed.

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14. Calton Hill: grand ambitions and the work of keeping time

The twelve columns on Calton Hill are enough to give you the scale of a project that ran out of money. I like knowing where the finished building was meant to go. It makes the National Monument feel like the record of an ambition somebody had to pay for.

Charles Robert Cockerell and William Henry Playfair designed an ambitious commission: supporters raised less than half the proposed £42,000. Edinburgh World Heritage’s history also describes disagreement over whether Scottish sacrifice required its own memorial or could be represented by a British monument in London. I find that argument worth carrying up the hill. The choice of architecture expressed intellectual and national ambition; the failure to pay for it did not remove those intentions from the columns.

The neighbouring observatory dealt with a different kind of ambition. A Gothic tower in Observatory House survives from an eighteenth-century attempt to establish astronomical work here. Playfair designed the main new observatory building in 1818, and a larger transit telescope installed in 1831 remains inside. These instruments observed a star crossing a fixed line in the sky, helping establish accurate time. The observatory’s history makes the hill more interesting to me than a collection of skyline ornaments. Its position supported exacting work.

That work had practical value for ships. A navigator needed a reliable chronometer to calculate longitude, and a dependable signal allowed it to be checked before sailing. A time ball installed on the Nelson Monument in the nineteenth century supplied a visible signal to vessels in the Firth of Forth. The One O’Clock Gun, introduced in 1861, provided an audible counterpart when visibility failed. The tower commemorating Nelson and Trafalgar thus acquired another job, connecting astronomy to maritime trade.

The time signal is my favourite connection with the port below. A navigator could check a chronometer before taking it to sea. The Royal Observatory moved to Blackford Hill in 1896 as city light became a problem. Once you’ve thought about the work of keeping time, there’s quite a bit more to see here than columns and a view.

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15. Scott Monument: the carpenter who gave a writer a place on the skyline

Scott has his dog Maida with him at the base of the monument. John Steell carved them in Carrara marble. I like giving that bit a moment before looking up. You can still find an ordinary man and a dog underneath all the work it took to make a writer part of the skyline.

George Meikle Kemp deserves some of the attention usually reserved for Walter Scott at this monument. Kemp trained as a carpenter before securing one of Edinburgh’s most conspicuous architectural commissions. His route to it was not a single unlikely triumph. Entering the first competition in 1836 under the name John Morvo, borrowed from a medieval master-mason inscription at Melrose Abbey, he won one of three prizes. A second competition in 1838 brought him the commission.

Construction began in 1840. Kemp combined pointed arches, pinnacles and flying buttresses in Binny sandstone, drawing on the forms of Gothic churches for a public literary monument about sixty-one metres high. The historic building record identifies a spiral stair and museum room within it. From a distance the open structure can seem almost entirely decorative. Knowing there is a small building inside helps explain the thickness, connections and access routes its design had to accommodate.

Characters from Scott’s fiction and figures from Scottish literature occupy niches around the structure. Notice how those figures are distributed even without recognising every one. The books supplied people who could become part of a building, extending the monument beyond a portrait of the author. That is a particularly apt commission for a writer whose work had helped people picture Scotland: stories themselves were being given a place on the city’s streets.

George Meikle Kemp drowned in 1844, before the public opening in 1846. His brother-in-law Thomas Bonnar completed the job. From below you can pick out the figures in niches, and I’d think about the carpenter’s work of getting them all up there as well as the writer whose characters they were.

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16. Dean Village: the working history beside the Water of Leith

Dean Village once helped feed Edinburgh. That’s the bit of the story I like to put back into the river view. The Water of Leith powered grain mills and the city’s bakers owned mills and granaries here. All the grain had to get down to the water and the flour had to get back out.

The Baxters, Edinburgh’s incorporation of bakers, owned mills and granaries in the village. Grain had to be delivered, ground and passed on to the people making bread. The Damhead weir directed water towards mills on the north bank, making the river part of that chain. Later steam-powered milling at Leith weakened the old settlement’s role. These connections give a riverside walk a useful subject: this small place belonged to a food-supply system reaching into the much larger city.

Dean Bridge makes another relationship with Edinburgh unusually visible. Thomas Telford’s bridge opened in 1832, carrying the road north about thirty-two metres above the river. Edinburgh Libraries’ historic photograph and record show the scale of the work. The local crossing and working settlement remained below while an expanding road network passed overhead. I like the way the valley lets us read those two levels of movement together, without needing a complicated explanation of urban growth.

Well Court came later, as investment in housing for artisans and tradesmen. John R. Findlay, proprietor of The Scotsman, commissioned Sydney Mitchell and Wilson to design fifty-four flats around a courtyard, with a clock tower and communal hall. The listed-building record dates it to 1883–86. Findlay’s own home on Rothesay Terrace overlooked the village. The development was close to its patron in a literal as well as a financial sense.

Well Court was for working households. Residents were expected to observe temperance and attend Sunday worship. Recent conservation repaired the roofs, windows and sandstone. On a public walk beside the water I think about how much the appearance of a village can change once the work people came here to do has gone elsewhere.

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17. Leith’s Shore: the working port with a history of its own

The Custom House is the building I keep in mind on the Shore. It went up in 1810–12 where there had been shipbuilding. A place that had made vessels now made room for people to put a value on what came in them. That seems a good way to start getting to know a working port.

Control of the port could also influence the future of Scotland. In the siege of 1560, English and Scottish Protestant troops attacked fortifications held by French supporters of Mary of Guise, the queen regent. Political and religious alliances made Leith a military objective. The gateway on Dock Street belongs to a different phase: the Cromwellian citadel of the seventeenth century. These are separate episodes. What links them is the recurring strategic importance of access from the sea, rather than one continuous war.

The fraternity of masters and mariners provided another kind of organisation. Historic Environment Scotland traces its origins to 1380 and its support for injured and retired seafarers. The present Trinity House dates from 1818, replacing an earlier almshouse. Navigational instruments, paintings and teaching charts connect expertise with welfare. A sailor needed skills to make a living, and an injury could bring that livelihood to an abrupt end.

The early nineteenth-century teaching maps include the Baltic, Mediterranean and West Indies. HES’s interpretation also addresses the collection’s connections with empire and Atlantic slavery. The charts seem to me a useful starting point for understanding those connections. An impressive receiving port tells only part of the history of goods that may have been produced through coercion elsewhere. The collection provides particular evidence through which to consider those relationships, rather than leaving international trade as an abstract source of prosperity.

Leith was an independent burgh from 1833 until it joined Edinburgh in 1920, a change that met local opposition. When I read that beside the records at Trinity House, it’s easier to hear a place talking about its own affairs. I’d give the waterfront an outing of its own and arrange a Trinity House tour separately if one is running.

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18. Craigmillar Castle: family life and a dangerous royal association

There are gunholes in the curtain wall and kitchen ranges around the old tower. I like the distance between those two details at Craigmillar. A house that had to be defended also needed somewhere for everybody to eat. You can follow the household as it takes up more space around the original tower.

The Prestons acquired the estate in 1374. Their fifteenth-century curtain wall contains inverted-keyhole gunholes, designed to accommodate firearms; a family chapel and further buildings expanded the accommodation. Look for the junctions between these additions. They show successive responses to practical needs: protecting an entrance, providing for worship and making room for a household that could no longer function entirely inside a tower.

Mary, Queen of Scots visited in 1563 and returned in November 1566 to convalesce after a serious illness at Jedburgh. That year had already brought Rizzio’s murder and the birth of her son James. The small chamber traditionally called Queen Mary’s Room is famous, but HES considers a suite in the east range more likely to have housed her. I am persuaded by the caution. A room name can preserve a royal association without proving exactly where the visitor slept.

The alleged Craigmillar Bond needs a stronger qualification. It concerns a supposed agreement among nobles to remove Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley, before his subsequent murder. In its detailed Statement of Significance, HES says that no copy survives and that most historians doubt the bond’s existence. The claim is too uncertain to use as an established episode in the castle’s history. The royal stay is documented; the claim about an agreement has a different evidential status.

The domestic remains give us more secure ground. Kitchens, halls and connecting ranges allowed work and social life to spread beyond the tower’s stacked rooms. Sir John Gilmour acquired the estate in 1660 and rebuilt the west range, bringing another generation’s expectations of comfort into the enclosure. Larger windows are part of that change. What interests me is the ability of an old fortified residence to remain useful while its owners altered how they wanted to live.

In the grounds there are earthworks of a P-shaped fishpond. I’d make time for those if the paths suit. Mary’s visit is documented, the supposed bond against Darnley is contested, and the fishpond is a piece of ground where you can see how somebody planned to feed a household.

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19. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: medicine and the wider world

The Botanic Cottage is my way into this garden’s history. A gardener could live downstairs and students could learn about plants upstairs. It was built in 1764–65 at Leith Walk and moved to the present garden. I find it easier to picture a medical student learning what a leaf looked like once there’s a room to put them in.

Medical students learning to recognise plants were among the reasons Edinburgh needed a botanic garden. Physicians Robert Sibbald and Andrew Balfour established a physic garden near Holyrood in 1670, with James Sutherland as keeper. A living collection supplied material for examination and teaching. I find that beginning useful when planning a visit: the history of healthcare sits beneath the much broader scientific and horticultural purposes of today’s garden.

The garden’s own history follows several moves. A second site at Trinity Hospital in 1675 occupied ground now taken by Waverley Station. The move to Leith Walk in 1763 brought cleaner air; transfer to Inverleith began in 1820 and continued over time. Edinburgh’s expansion repeatedly affected where its plants could grow. I like the way this history changes the sense of a permanent institution: the name continued while gardeners had to establish the collection in different ground.

The Palm Houses show a different kind of technical work. The Tropical Palm House opened in 1834 and the taller Temperate Palm House in 1858. RBGE’s glasshouse history explains the deliberate use of masonry in the latter to moderate temperature and supply shade. Those material decisions interest me as much as the height. The architecture had to help living collections survive far from the climates in which they evolved.

The wider collections depended on skills that were not always credited equally. RBGE’s research into botanical drawings examines work by Indian artists commissioned by Scottish surgeons in the East India Company. A drawing could transmit close observation across continents while the artist’s contribution became less prominent than the commissioner’s name. These are histories of artistic skill and scientific knowledge within particular colonial relationships. The archive helps recover their participants more precisely.

George Forrest’s work in China depended on Lao Chao, also known as Zhao Chengzhang, and the people he helped organise. The names of collectors, artists and gardeners tell you a great deal about how a garden like this came to know what it knows. Give the cottage a look as well as the grand glasshouses. The work needed people at every scale.

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20. Panmure House: the later life and continuing work of Adam Smith

I like remembering Adam Smith had a job in customs. It brought him back to Edinburgh and gives the man behind The Wealth of Nations somewhere quite practical to be on an ordinary day. Panmure House was his home in his later years, shared with his mother and cousin.

Smith’s appointment as a commissioner of customs brought him to Edinburgh, as the University of Glasgow’s biography explains. I find the administrative job a useful addition to the familiar portrait of the thinker. His work included the business of government as well as writing about how societies organised wealth.

The house began in 1691 as a residence built by Lieutenant-Colonel George Murray and later took its name from the Earl of Panmure. Smith shared it with his mother, Margaret, and his cousin Janet Douglas. The building’s history places the philosopher within a household. Rooms for reading and conversation were also rooms in which family life continued. That domestic setting makes the philosopher’s work more tangible to me.

At Panmure House he revised both that book and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Visitors included the chemist Joseph Black, geologist James Hutton and philosopher Adam Ferguson. Their company helps explain a city in which arguments crossed the boundaries of what we now treat as separate subjects. Smith remained part of that intellectual exchange until his death in 1790. The house makes an interesting comparison with the observatory and Botanic Garden: each concerns how knowledge developed, through different kinds of work.

Smith owned more than three thousand volumes, but his library dispersed after his death. The present library project gathers copies of selected titles he owned. It reconstructs aspects of his reading rather than restoring an intact collection of his original books. I like the questions the project makes possible: what did he read beyond the subjects for which he is famous, and which conversations might those books have supported?

The north wing was demolished in 1838 and the remainder went on to house foundry offices. A restoration recovered a place for books, events and conversation. I’d look at the outside on a Canongate walk and book an event if the rooms interest you. The house makes it possible to think about where Smith’s work went on between one published edition and the next.

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