CitiesScotland
Edinburgh got so unpleasant that it built a second Edinburgh to escape into. The Old Town was packed onto a glacial ridge behind walls it no longer needed after the 1707 Union, filthy and losing its wealthy to London. So the council drained the loch below the castle, threw a bridge north, and in 1767 handed a 26-year-old architect the job of laying out a rational grid on empty fields. Both cities are still standing, arguing.
The fortress on the volcanic plug at the west end of the ridge. The shape of the whole city follows from this rock: a glacier split around the hard basalt and left a long slope of softer material trailing east behind it. The Royal Mile runs down that tail. Geologists call the formation crag and tail, and Edinburgh is the textbook example.
The street running down the glacial tail from castle to palace, with narrow closes dropping away on both sides. Those closes are steep because the ground is. Before the New Town, most of Edinburgh's population lived stacked in tenements along here, aristocrats and labourers in the same stair at different heights, which was unusual anywhere in Europe.
The green valley between the two towns, and formerly a body of water. The Nor Loch was Edinburgh's defensive northern edge and also where the city put its sewage. Draining it from 1759 was the precondition for building the New Town at all. The gardens are a filled-in cesspit with very good views.
James Craig's grid of 1767: three parallel streets, two squares, and a deliberate rejection of everything the Old Town was. Craig was 26 and effectively unknown when he won the competition. The layout was a statement about Enlightenment rationality, and the fact that Princes Street is built on one side only was so the money looking out of the windows had a view.
An extinct volcano inside the city boundary, climbable in an hour from the end of the Royal Mile. It is genuinely a mountain in the middle of a capital. The rock formations here helped James Hutton work out that the Earth was vastly older than anyone had assumed, which makes this hill a founding site of modern geology.
The hill east of the New Town, covered in neoclassical monuments including one that stops abruptly after twelve columns. The National Monument was meant to reproduce the Parthenon as a memorial to the Napoleonic wars, ran out of money, and has stood unfinished since 1829. Locals have called it Edinburgh's Disgrace for nearly two centuries.
A graveyard in the Old Town, now visited mostly for a small dog and for surnames that appear in the Harry Potter books. Its harder history is the Covenanters' Prison at the back, where hundreds of prisoners were held in the open in 1679. The tourist version and the actual version of this place have very little to do with each other.
A 61-metre Gothic spire over a seated statue of Walter Scott, blackened by two centuries of soot and never cleaned, because the stone would be damaged by it. You can climb the inside up a staircase that narrows severely near the top. It is the largest monument to a writer anywhere.
Enric Miralles's building at the foot of the Royal Mile, opened in 2004 at roughly ten times its original budget and years late. It is genuinely divisive and it is also award-winning. The design deliberately sits low against the crags behind rather than asserting itself, which was read by critics as either humility or timidity.
A former milling settlement on the Water of Leith, ten minutes from Princes Street and almost entirely missed by visitors. Grain was milled here for centuries before the New Town existed. The walkway along the river runs for miles and is the fastest way in the city to stop being in a city.
Edinburgh's most photographed park is a drained sewer.
The Nor Loch below the castle served as both a defensive barrier and the city's dumping ground for waste. Draining it from 1759 was what made the New Town buildable, and Princes Street Gardens now occupy the basin.
The New Town was designed by a 26-year-old nobody.
The council ran a competition in 1766 and received six entries. James Craig, young and effectively unknown, won it, and his grid of three streets and two squares was approved in July 1767. It is now a World Heritage site.
The city is shaped by a glacier going round a rock.
Castle Rock is hard volcanic basalt. A glacier split around it and sheltered the softer material behind, leaving a long tapering slope to the east. That slope is the Royal Mile. The formation is called crag and tail and Edinburgh is its textbook illustration.
There is an unfinished Parthenon on a hill, and it has been called a disgrace since 1829.
The National Monument on Calton Hill was meant to reproduce the Parthenon as a Napoleonic war memorial. Funding ran out after twelve columns and it was abandoned. Edinburgh's Disgrace is the name locals have used ever since.
Edinburgh built its second city because London was stealing the first one.
After the 1707 Union removed the need for a defensible walled town and drew Scotland's wealthy and influential south, the city faced losing its own elite. The New Town was an explicit attempt to give them a reason to stay.
A hill inside the city helped prove the Earth was ancient.
James Hutton studied the rock formations around Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags, and what he found there fed directly into the argument that geological time was far deeper than contemporary estimates allowed.
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