Edinburgh’s shape is geological. Around 340 million years ago a volcano erupted here; later, a glacier moving east ground away everything soft around the hard plug and left a crag with a long tail of debris trailing behind it.
The castle sits on the crag. The Royal Mile runs down the tail. Everything else follows.
Two towns
The Old Town is the medieval city on that ridge — a single spine from the castle to Holyrood with narrow closes dropping steeply off both sides. Hemmed in by walls and water, it could only build upwards, and by the eighteenth century it had tenements of ten and twelve storeys, some of the tallest residential buildings in Europe, with every class of person stacked in the same stair.
The New Town is the answer to that. James Craig, aged 26, won the competition in 1767 with a grid: three parallel streets between two squares, laid out on drained and levelled ground north of the loch. It was built over about seventy years, it is the largest surviving Georgian townscape in the world, and it is why Edinburgh’s centre feels like two different cities placed side by side.
Both are inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Between them lies Princes Street Gardens, in the valley of the drained Nor Loch, with the railway running along the bottom.
The hills
Edinburgh has seven, more or less, depending on who is counting. The ones that matter: Castle Rock; Arthur’s Seat at 251 metres, an entire extinct volcano inside the city with genuine hill walking on it; Calton Hill with its monuments; and Salisbury Crags, the cliff wall where James Hutton worked out the age of the earth.
The Pentlands rise immediately to the south, and the Firth of Forth is to the north with Fife beyond it.
Beyond the centre
Leith is the port two miles north, an independent burgh until 1920 and still distinct. Stockbridge is a village in the valley of the Water of Leith. Bruntsfield, Marchmont and Newington on the south side are Victorian tenement districts around the university and the Meadows. Morningside is the byword for genteel.
Scale
About 550,000 people in the city, making it Scotland’s second largest after Glasgow and its capital since the fifteenth century. The centre is small — you can walk the whole World Heritage Site in an afternoon — and the hills are what make it feel bigger.
In August the population roughly doubles.
Language
English, in a Scottish variety. Scots words are in everyday use — ken for know, bairn for child, dreich for grey and wet weather, outwith for outside of, which appears in official documents. Gaelic was never the language of this part of Scotland and the bilingual station signs are a modern policy rather than local history.