Discover Edinburgh

Two towns, one city, built on volcanoes

Edinburgh has been Scotland's capital since the fifteenth century, and its shape still tells the story plainly. The Old Town runs down a glacial tail of rock from Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, a single mile of street with centuries of closes, wynds and stacked tenements hanging off it. When the Old Town became unbearably crowded in the eighteenth century, the city held a competition to design a new one: James Craig's 1767 plan gave Edinburgh the New Town, a Georgian grid of squares and crescents so intact that both halves together are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

What makes the place feel unlike any other British city is the geology underneath it. The Castle sits on a volcanic plug, Calton Hill carries its monuments like a stage set, and Holyrood Park wraps a real hill, Arthur's Seat, in the middle of the city, with the long basalt wall of Salisbury Crags facing the Old Town. Every August the festivals take over almost every hall, cellar and courtyard in town; the other eleven months belong to the locals, the students, and the neighbourhoods, from Stockbridge's Sunday market to the old port at Leith, which has gone from rough docks to one of Scotland's best eating and drinking quarters without losing its accent.