Where To Go in Edinburgh
27 places across 9 categories — the landmarks on the postcards, the observation decks, the museums, the parks, and the neighborhoods where the city actually lives.
Landmarks
TODO — what landmarks in Edinburgh are actually worth the time.
Edinburgh Castle
A fortress on a volcanic plug that has been besieged more often than anywhere else in Britain, holding the oldest crown jewels in the islands.
Palace of Holyroodhouse
The King's residence in Scotland, an abbey ruin behind it, and the room where Rizzio was stabbed fifty-six times.
The Scottish Parliament
A building that came in ten times over budget, three years late, won the Stirling Prize, and is free to walk into.
St Giles' Cathedral
The High Kirk of Edinburgh, where Knox preached the Reformation and a woman allegedly threw a stool at a bishop.
Calton Hill
An unfinished Parthenon, an upturned telescope and a monument to Nelson, on the hill that gave Edinburgh the Athens comparison.
The Scott Monument
Sixty-one metres of blackened Gothic spire over a seated novelist, climbed by 287 steps that get narrower as you go.
Museums
TODO — what museums in Edinburgh are actually worth the time.
National Museum of Scotland
Dolly the sheep, the Lewis chessmen and a Victorian glass hall, all free, with a roof terrace almost nobody finds.
Scottish National Gallery
Titian, Vermeer, Velázquez and the skating minister, free, in two Playfair temples on a bank of earth dug out of the New Town.
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
A red sandstone cathedral to Scottish faces, with a processional frieze of national history round the entrance hall.
Surgeons' Hall Museums
One of the largest pathology collections in the world, including a pocketbook bound in the skin of the murderer William Burke.
Camera Obscura and World of Illusions
A Victorian optical show that still works, on top of five floors of mirrors and illusions aimed squarely at children.
History
TODO — what history in Edinburgh are actually worth the time.
Greyfriars Kirkyard
Where the Covenant was signed, where the body snatchers worked, and where a small dog became the city's most profitable legend.
The Real Mary King's Close
A seventeenth-century street sealed under the City Chambers, where people went on living after the building was put on top of them.
Old Calton Burial Ground
David Hume's mausoleum, a monument to five reformers transported to Australia, and Abraham Lincoln, all in one small graveyard.
Parks & Outdoors
TODO — what parks & outdoors in Edinburgh are actually worth the time.
Arthur's Seat and Holyrood Park
An extinct volcano 251 metres high, inside the city, with an Iron Age fort on it and a climb that takes forty minutes.
Princes Street Gardens
A drained loch turned into a valley garden, with a railway hidden in the bottom of it and the castle rising straight out of one side.
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Seventy acres and a Victorian glasshouse range, free to walk into, twenty minutes north of the New Town.
Food & Drink
TODO — what food & drink in Edinburgh are actually worth the time.
The Scotch Whisky Experience
A barrel ride through the making of whisky, and the largest collection of unopened Scotch in the world at the end of it.
The Shore, Leith
A working dock turned into the best eating in Edinburgh, with more Michelin stars per hundred metres than the Old Town.
Edinburgh Farmers' Market
Saturday mornings under the castle rock, with venison, shellfish and cheese from people who produced them.
Culture & Music
TODO — what culture & music in Edinburgh are actually worth the time.
The Edinburgh Festivals
The largest arts festival in the world, plus five others running at the same time, in a city that doubles in size for three weeks.
The Usher Hall
A domed Edwardian concert hall paid for by a brewer, with the best acoustic in Scotland and a glass wing bolted onto the side.
Shopping
TODO — what shopping in Edinburgh are actually worth the time.
Day Trips
TODO — what day trips in Edinburgh are actually worth the time.
Rosslyn Chapel
Fifteenth-century carving of astonishing density, in a chapel that was never finished and became famous for the wrong reasons.
Stirling Castle
The key to Scotland, on another volcanic rock, with a restored Renaissance palace and two battlefields in view.
Neighbourhoods
TODO — what each part of Edinburgh is like to walk around, and who lives there.
Leith
An independent burgh until 1920 that never quite agreed to it, and now the part of Edinburgh with the best food and the fewest tourists.
Stockbridge
A village inside the city on the Water of Leith, with a Sunday market, a colony of workers' cottages and no coach parties.