Qualla: Edinburgh Old Town

Edinburgh Old Town: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Twenty thousand years ago a glacier from the west crashed into a hard plug of volcanic basalt and split around it. The ice scoured a deep gouge on either side, then dumped its load of rock and debris in the lee of the obstacle - a long, narrow ridge sloping eastward from the crag down to what would later become Holyrood Palace. People started living on that ridge sometime before the Romans arrived. By the 12th century it was a royal burgh. The street running its length, just 1.12 miles end to end, is the Royal Mile. Everything that matters in medieval Edinburgh happened along it.

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Edinburgh Old Town: The Stink of Auld Reekie

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hemmed in by walls on three sides and a brackish loch on the fourth, the medieval Old Town could not spread outward, so it grew upward. Tenements stacked to twelve and fourteen storeys - the first urban high-rises in Europe. Multiple families shared a single stairway, called a cl...

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Edinburgh Old Town: The Royal Mile, Top to Bottom

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Mile begins at the Castle Esplanade, where the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo plays out every August. Just below stands the Tolbooth Kirk - now called The Hub - a confident Victorian Gothic church never consecrated, its spire the highest point in the central city outside the...

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Edinburgh Old Town: Grassmarket and the Body Snatchers

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

South of the castle the medieval city overflowed in the 14th century into the dank hollow of the Grassmarket, where livestock were traded and condemned criminals were hanged. By the 18th century the area was tenement housing for the poor and the desperate. In 1828 the West Port a...

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Edinburgh Old Town: Greyfriars and a Statue of a Dog

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Greyfriars Kirkyard, behind the market, is full of melancholy 17th-century tombs and the bones of plague victims. Outside its gates stands a Victorian drinking fountain topped with the small bronze statue tourists endlessly photograph. Greyfriars Bobby was a small terrier owned b...

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Edinburgh Old Town: Arthur's Seat and the Deep Time

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

South and east of Holyrood Palace lies Holyrood Park, created by King James V in the 16th century as royal hunting ground and a wilderness in miniature inside the city walls. It is dominated by Arthur's Seat, the main vent of a volcano that erupted 340 million years ago in the Ca...

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