Once a year, on a Friday in August, a local man steps out of a Queensferry house wearing a costume of sticky burdock burrs that has been pressed onto his body until only his shoes, his hands, and two small holes for his eyes show through. He cannot bend his arms. He cannot sit down. With a sash, a floral hat, and two staves grasped in burr-wrapped fists, he begins a slow nine-hour walk through every pub in town, sipped whisky through a straw by his attendants, while children collect coins on his behalf. The custom is over three centuries old and probably pagan. Nobody quite knows why. South Queensferry, it turns out, is full of that kind of story.
The name belongs to Margaret. In the eleventh century, Margaret, queen consort to King Malcolm III and later Saint Margaret, established a ferry service across the Firth of Forth at this point, the narrowest practical crossing on the river. A mid-twelfth-century source records the place as Portus Regine, the queen's port. By the seventeenth century a Gaelic source called it Caschilis, deep or sudden strait. The ferry Margaret started lasted, in one form or another, until 1964, when the Forth Road Bridge opened and made it obsolete. Roughly nine centuries of service ended in a year. Today three bridges span the Forth here: the 1890 Forth Rail Bridge with its three cantilevered red diamonds, the 1964 road bridge, and the 2017 Queensferry Crossing. They are the town's defining horizon.
In 2012, archaeologists working in advance of the Queensferry Crossing construction excavated a dwelling at Echline that dated to roughly 10,000 years ago. It may be the earliest home discovered in Scotland, and possibly the whole United Kingdom. Margaret's ferry, in other words, was built on a crossing point that humans had been using for ninety centuries before her. The strait was always going to draw people. The Forth narrows here in a way that demands attention from anyone trying to move north or south through eastern Scotland.
On New Year's Day, hundreds of people walk into the freezing Firth of Forth in fancy dress. The Loony Dook started in 1986 as a joke between three locals looking for a hangover cure. They did it again the next year for charity. It is now part of the official Edinburgh Hogmanay celebrations and has inspired imitators at North Berwick and Kirkcaldy. The name is constructed Scots: loony from lunatic, dook meaning to dip or bathe. Two of the original three, James MacKenzie and Ian Armstrong, kept showing up every year. In 2016 they wore specially designed T-shirts marking thirty years of dooks. There is something quietly Scottish about the whole thing, the joke that became a tradition, the cold water that became a charity, the locals who simply kept doing it.
Under the southern end of the Forth Rail Bridge sits the Hawes Inn, dating from the seventeenth century. Opposite is the pier that served Margaret's ferry until 1964. Robert Louis Stevenson, an Edinburgh native, used the Hawes Inn as a setting in his 1886 novel Kidnapped, the moment when David Balfour is delivered to the brig Covenant. Stevenson knew the place. The brig has long since gone, but the Inn still serves drinks under the arches of the rail bridge above. The pier is now used by tourist boats including the ferry to Inchcolm, the small island in the Forth where a twelfth-century abbey still stands.
Some of the older buildings carry harder stories. Black Castle, a house on the High Street built in 1626, takes its name from a tragedy. When its original owner, a sea-captain, was lost at sea, his maid was accused of paying a local beggar-woman to cast a spell that killed him. Both women were burned for witchcraft. The seventeenth century, in Scotland, executed thousands of women on charges like these. The brutal frame is part of the town's record, not a footnote. Plewlands House, also from the seventeenth century, now belongs to the National Trust. St Mary's Episcopal Church, dating from the 1450s and formerly a Carmelite friary, is the only medieval Carmelite church still in use anywhere in the British Isles. The South Queensferry Cemetery on Ferrymuir Lane holds a remarkable number of Royal Navy war graves, many for casualties of the 1916 Battle of Jutland brought here for burial.
In 2025, a Telegraph study ranked 1,250 towns across the United Kingdom. South Queensferry came first. With its High Street curving along the water, its three bridges visible above, the Hawes Inn at one end and the Tolbooth clock tower at the other, it is the kind of place where you can stand on the harbour with a pint, watch a train cross overhead, and feel that the location has earned its long tenure. The 2022 census recorded 10,216 residents. Notable former locals include the physicist Stephen Hendry's snooker namesake, the science fiction writer Ken MacLeod, and the composer Anna Meredith. They all chose this strait.
South Queensferry sits at 55.99 deg N, 3.40 deg W, on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, ten miles northwest of central Edinburgh. From the air, the three Forth bridges are unmistakable: the red Forth Rail Bridge to the east, the older 1964 Road Bridge in the middle, and the white-pylon Queensferry Crossing to the west. Edinburgh Airport (EGPH) is six miles south. Hopetoun House lies two miles west, Dalmeny House two miles east. Best viewed from 3,000 to 5,000 feet on the approach into Edinburgh from the north.