Dolly the sheep, the Lewis chessmen and a Victorian glass hall, all free, with a roof terrace almost nobody finds.
Two museums joined into one. The Victorian half, opened in 1866, is a cast-iron and glass Grand Gallery three storeys high, top-lit, with balconies running round it — a building of the same family as the Crystal Palace and one of the great interiors in Scotland. The modern half, opened in 1998 by Benson and Forsyth, is a sandstone drum and tower next door holding the Scottish collections.
Entry is free, which in a city where almost everything else charges is worth stating plainly.
What to see
Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, born at the Roslin Institute outside Edinburgh in 1996 and taxidermied here since 2003. She rotates slowly in a case and she is smaller than you expect.
The Lewis chessmen — eleven of the walrus-ivory pieces found on a Hebridean beach in 1831 are here, with the majority in the British Museum. The bishops look appalled and the berserkers are biting their shields.
The Millennium Clock, a four-metre kinetic sculpture of a cathedral with a monkey, a Pietà and figures representing the atrocities of the twentieth century, which grinds into motion on the hour and is genuinely disturbing.
The Scottish galleries run from the earliest people through the Reformation, the Jacobites, the Union and industry. The Kingdom of the Scots section has the Monymusk Reliquary and the Bute Mazer.
Also: the Egyptian and East Asian collections, a large natural history section with a suspended whale skeleton, and a technology floor with the Wylam Dilly locomotive and a working Newcomen engine model.
With children
This is the best museum in Scotland for them. The science and technology floors are hands-on throughout, there is an animal world gallery, and the Grand Gallery has enough space to let them run.
Practicalities
Free, open daily, and large enough that three hours is a minimum. There are two entrances — the modern one on Chambers Street at street level, and the original Victorian doors up steps.
Temporary exhibitions are ticketed. The café in the Grand Gallery is decent; the Tower restaurant on the roof is expensive and has the view.
Greyfriars Kirkyard is directly behind, and the two make an obvious pair.
More Museums
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.