The name is a worn-down version of "Brounysfelde" or Brown's Fields, after a medieval landowner named Richard Broun. In 1381, during the reign of Robert II, a charter granted these lands to William Lauder, and the Lauder family held Bruntsfield for centuries. The mansion they built, Bruntsfield House, served as the dower house for successive Lauder brides for 226 years before passing through several other families. Sir William Nisbet, John Fairlie of Braid, and eventually George Warrender of Lochend each held it. The Warrenders still flew the Union Jack over the house whenever they were in residence, right up until just before the Second World War. Today the old house is buried inside James Gillespie's High School, where it serves as the admin block, classroom corridors radiating from rooms where Scottish lairds once dined.

Bruntsfield Links is one of the earliest sites in the world where golf was played. Edinburgh's golfing tradition runs back at least to the 17th century here, and a pitch-and-putt course still occupies the links today, keeping the thread unbroken. The Burgh Muir, the larger common land of which the Links were once part, stretched all the way from the Meadows in the north to the Braid Burn at the foot of the Pentland Hills. In darker centuries, it was where Edinburgh's plague victims were buried, away from the city walls. At the southern end of the Links, near Bruntsfield House, lies a sunken green known locally as Tumbler's Hollow, a former quarry that earned its name from generations of children rolling down its grassy sides.

Where Bruntsfield meets Morningside, four Victorian churches cluster around a single junction so densely that locals have nicknamed it Holy Corner. Walk in any direction here and a spire frames the view. The neighbourhood's literary credentials run nearly as deep as its religious ones. Muriel Spark, the novelist who would write The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, grew up here, and the 1969 film of her novel opens with Miss Brodie setting out for school from a flat on Admiral Terrace. More recently, Alexander McCall Smith made Bruntsfield home to his amateur detective Isabel Dalhousie, a philosopher who haunts the deli on the corner and walks her thoughts out along the same streets Spark once walked. The Scottish comedian Chic Murray ran an eccentrically decorated hotel on Bruntsfield Crescent for years, presiding over a place as quirky as he was.

Bruntsfield's housing is mostly high-quality stone tenements interspersed with the occasional grand villa, the kind of building that wraps families in thick walls and tall windows. Edinburgh Bicycle Co-operative, Scotland's longest-established worker co-operative, has its flagship shop here. A children's bookshop called Pooh Corner trades on the same Bruntsfield Place. The streets are arranged around the Links, which slope gently downhill toward the Meadows at Melville Drive, where the old Burgh Loch was finally drained in the 19th century and parkland took its place. It is a neighbourhood that has resisted being swallowed by the modern city without becoming a museum piece, and that combination is rarer than it sounds.