Edinburgh

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• St Giles' Cathedral 1,500 points

  Get out into the square and look at the top of the tower. The stonework is cut into the shape of a crown, held there by eight thin ribs of stone leaning in from the corners. Once you have seen that, you will pick this roof out from every rise in town. It sits square in the middle of the level, so you meet it whether you planned to or not.

• Greyfriars Kirk 500 points

  The best of it is outdoors. A high wall runs right round the yard, the level inside is a storey above the lane in places, and the carved slabs set along that wall are worth a slow lap. It is the quietest half acre on this hill, and it is two minutes from the loudest.

• National Gallery 500 points

  It sits in the ditch between the two towns, with a bank of earth heaped up behind it and a road running over the top. The way to it from the ridge is a long flight of steps, and the columns come at you edge on for the entire descent. Free to walk into, which is the correct price for a roof.

• National Museum of Scotland 500 points

  Two buildings, one door. The hall on your left is iron and glass and full of daylight; the block on your right is pale sandstone with slots for windows and a drum at the corner. Nobody meant them to be neighbours. Go up as far as the stairs will carry you: there is a terrace on the roof, and the ridge you have been eating lies out flat beneath it.

• Scott Monument 500 points

  A spire built as a roof over one seated man, and gone almost black with age. Inside, a stair screws up to a balcony near the top and tightens every floor, so the last leg is an honest squeeze. From the pavement the thing only reads as tall. It is more than tall.

• Camera Obscura & World of Illusions 250 points

  The last address before the esplanade, and the one you keep nearly walking by on the way up. The roof is open and railed the whole way round, so the town arrives from every direction at once, right at the point where the ridge gives out and the rock takes over. Best seat at the top of the level.

• Canongate Kirk 250 points

  Look at the apex of the roof before you go in. A set of antlers up there with a cross standing between them, which is the badge of this end of the road. And the gable curves, a proper Dutch swell, where every other face along this street is flat. It reads like a village kirk that wandered into a capital and sat down.

• Central Library 250 points

  Read the words cut over the door before you push it. Then push it: you come in at the top floor and the reading rooms drop away underneath you, because the whole thing is hung on the flank of the ridge. Warm, quiet and free, which for this much floor is nearly indecent.

• John Knox House 250 points

  You meet this one before you read its sign, because it steps out into the road and stops the view dead. Timber galleries hang off the face of it, and the stair to the door climbs on the outside. Everything along here used to look like that. This is what is left of it.

• Scottish American War Memorial 250 points

  Down in the gardens under the rock, at the low end of everything. Bronze, gone green, and set so near the path that most people arrive at its back and never turn round. Turn round. Then look where he is looking.

• St Cecilia's Hall 250 points

  Very easy to miss. From the lane it is a flat grey corner with one door in it, and everything worth having is indoors: rank on rank of old keyboards, several of them older than the walls holding them. You have to leave the ridge and drop into the valley to reach it, which is exactly why most people never do.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

The level is a volcano and the trail behind it. The hard plug cooled about 350 million years ago. Two million years ago the ice came through from the west and scraped the soft ground off either side, leaving the crag at one end and a long tail of harder rubble running east. That tail is the main street. Everything else falls off it, left or right, into the two valleys the ice dug out. The rock also sat over the point where the Roman road from the south reached the Forth, so whoever held it watched everyone arrive. And it runs downhill from one end to the other, which is the politest a city has ever been to me.

Sources: consultationhub.edinburgh.gov.uk

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

1128–1603

The crown, and close enough to hear. A royal castle held the rock, the town below it took its charters from the king, and in 1128 David I founded an abbey at the far end of the ridge that the palace later grew out of. Between those two ends stood the most important royal castle in the country and the seat of power in its principal burgh. The charters granted markets as well, so whoever was in charge lived a short walk from the fish stalls.

Sources: portal.historicenvironment.scot, consultationhub.edinburgh.gov.uk

1603–1707

One crown, two kingdoms, and the king living in the other one. The King of Scots inherited England in 1603 and went to London, and after that he boasted to the English parliament that he governed Scotland with his pen. The parliament and the privy council stayed here and carried out what the letters said. The street was as busy as ever. The man at the top of it hardly came back.

Sources: www.nrscotland.gov.uk, www.parliament.scot

1707–1999

London, in full. The Acts of Union of 1707 merged the two kingdoms into Great Britain, the parliament here closed, and a parliament of Great Britain opened at Westminster. The privy council that had been running the country by letter lasted one more year and was wound up on 1 May 1708. For most of three centuries, the answer to who runs this town was: someone a long way off.

Sources: www.parliament.scot, www.nrscotland.gov.uk

1999–

Back on the hill. The Scotland Act of 1998 set up a parliament here again, and it first met on 12 May 1999. It now sits at the bottom of the slope, at the far end of the street, on the flat where the road runs out. Which means the two ends of this level are the two ends of the argument, and you can eat the whole of it in an afternoon.

Sources: www.parliament.scot

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. The Royal Mile is two towns stitched end to end. Edinburgh ran from the castle down as far as a gate called the Netherbow. Beyond that gate lay the Canongate, a separate burgh, run by the canons of the abbey. The road still tells you where the join was: it pinches in at that spot and then opens out again. And nobody called the whole run the Royal Mile until the sixteenth century.

   Sources: consultationhub.edinburgh.gov.uk

2. In the middle of the eighteenth century there were around four hundred closes off this one street. Around a hundred are left. Most are labelled in gold lettering on black cast iron at the mouth, so you can read the old owners off the wall as you go by: an advocate, an anchor, a fishmonger, somebody called Bailie Fyfe. Four hundred narrow ways off a single spine. I would have been extremely well fed in 1750.

   Sources: consultationhub.edinburgh.gov.uk

3. The old markets are still written into the map. Grassmarket, Fishmarket, Fleshmarket, the Green Market, and the Land Market, which wore down over the years to Lawnmarket. All of them within a short walk of each other, all of them named after the one thing you could buy there. It is the only street plan I have ever met that reads like a menu.

   Sources: consultationhub.edinburgh.gov.uk

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 175streets
• 1,628dots
• 23.0km of street
• 31.0km on foot
• 8.8hours at a stroll