Qualla: Edinburgh South

Edinburgh South: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Benjamin Brock, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk south from the Royal Mile and the city changes character with surprising speed. Within a quarter mile you cross the broad open space of the Meadows, where 17th-century brewers once dumped their waste into a stinking loch. Within a mile you are among the baronial tenements of Marchmont, the bay-windowed villas of Bruntsfield and Morningside, and the rambling Victorian streets where Edinburgh houses its students. Push further south and you reach Robert Louis Stevenson's summer hamlet, a 4,500-year-old standing stone in someone's front yard, and the green wall of the Pentland Hills rising from the city's edge.

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Image: Benjamin Brock | CC BY-SA 3.0

Edinburgh South: The Meadows

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0. Until the 17th century this broad green park was the South Loch, a polluted lake fed by hill streams from the Pentlands and ringed by tanneries, slaughterhouses and breweries pumping their waste into water that also doubled as a public supply. The city drained it in stages across...

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Image: Kim Traynor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Edinburgh South: The Quartermile and the Kidney

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Supergolden, CC BY-SA 3.0. On Lauriston Place stands the long baronial bulk of Quartermile - the new commercial name given to what was, from 1872 to 2003, the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. In 1960 a team here performed the UK's first successful kidney transplant. Four years later in 1964 the infirmary open...

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Image: User:Supergolden | CC BY-SA 3.0

Edinburgh South: Stevenson at Swanston

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Pennington, CC BY-SA 2.0. South of the city, where the suburbs thin out and the Pentlands rise, lies the hamlet of Swanston - eight whitewashed thatched cottages around a green, almost unchanged since the 18th century. Robert Louis Stevenson's parents rented Swanston Cottage as a holiday house from 1867, ...

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Image: Mike Pennington | CC BY-SA 2.0

Edinburgh South: The Caiy Stane

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a quiet residential street called Caiystane View, off Oxgangs Road near the Pentland foothills, stands a chunk of reddish sandstone two metres tall. The Caiy Stane is Neolithic - probably between 4,000 and 5,000 years old - and was once part of a ritual complex spread across t...

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Image: Ad Meskens | CC BY-SA 3.0

Edinburgh South: Wild Edges

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steven Harrison (Struan), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Pentland Hills rear up just south of the city bypass and roll southwest for 20 miles toward Carstairs and Biggar. They are made of Devonian Old Red Sandstone, the same upland geology that runs across central Scotland; their highest summit, Scald Law, reaches 579 metres (1,900...

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Image: Steven Harrison (Struan) | CC BY-SA 3.0