An extinct volcano 251 metres high, inside the city, with an Iron Age fort on it and a climb that takes forty minutes.
Arthur’s Seat is the eroded remains of a volcano that was active around 340 million years ago, and Holyrood Park is 260 hectares of hill, crag, loch and grassland that begins at the foot of the Royal Mile. There is nothing else like it in a European capital: genuine wild ground, with a summit at 251 metres, a fifteen-minute walk from the parliament.
The name has nothing certain to do with King Arthur. The likeliest explanation is a corruption of Àrd-na-Said, or something similar in Gaelic, though nobody knows.
The geology
This is where James Hutton, the founder of modern geology, worked out in the 1780s that the earth was vastly older than anyone believed, by observing at Hutton’s Section in Salisbury Crags where molten rock had clearly forced its way into older sedimentary layers. There is a plaque. It is one of the most important places in the history of science and it has almost no visitors.
Routes up
From Dunsapie Loch (east side, reachable by the park road or bus 42 to Meadowbank and a walk): about twenty minutes of steady climbing on a clear path. The easiest by a distance.
From Holyrood (the palace end): the standard route, up the valley and round, about forty-five minutes. Steeper near the top and rocky.
The Radical Road along the base of Salisbury Crags is the dramatic low-level walk — built in the 1820s to employ unemployed weavers, at Walter Scott’s suggestion. It has been closed since 2018 because of rockfall, and remains so; check before planning it.
What to wear
Proper shoes. The paths are rock and grass, they are slippery when wet, and Scottish weather changes fast. People are rescued off this hill regularly, mostly in trainers. There is no shelter at the top and the wind is real.
The view
The whole city laid out below with the castle on its rock, the Forth and Fife to the north, the Pentlands to the south, and on a clear day the Bass Rock and Ben Lomond.
The rest of the park
St Anthony’s Chapel, a fifteenth-century ruin on a shoulder above St Margaret’s Loch. Duddingston Loch, a bird reserve, with the Sheep Heid Inn in the village beyond — one of the oldest pubs in Scotland, with a skittle alley.
On the summit at dawn on 1 May, people wash their faces in the dew, which is supposed to confer beauty and is at least a good excuse to be up there early.
More Parks & Outdoors
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.