Edinburgh, Scotland · Europe

6 ideal things to do in Edinburgh

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked September 4, 2025

1. 01

   Arthur's Seat before breakfast

   Holyrood Park, east of the Old Town·Mid-morning in winter; absurdly early in summer

   Two hundred and fifty-one metres of extinct volcano sitting inside the city, with the earthworks of an Iron Age fort still legible on the summit and the Firth of Forth laid out beyond it. Forty minutes up the eastern grass slope, rather less if you decide to race a stranger, which I did once and regretted well before the top. James Hutton worked out deep time on these rocks, which is a great deal to have happened on a hill you can climb in a jumper.

2. 02

   The National Museum of Scotland

   Chambers Street, Old Town·A wet afternoon, which Edinburgh will supply

   Free, enormous, and the only museum I know where the Lewis chessmen, a Pictish stone and the actual stuffed body of Dolly the sheep are about four minutes' walk apart. The Victorian Grand Gallery is a cast-iron hall with a four-storey column of eight hundred objects running up through the middle of it. I have gone in for an hour on three separate visits and come out after three, and I have still never found the roof terrace on the first attempt.

3. 03

   The One O'Clock Gun and the Calton Hill time ball

   Edinburgh Castle and the Nelson Monument·One o'clock, obviously

   Since 1854 a ball has dropped down a mast on the Nelson Monument at one o'clock so that ships in Leith could set their chronometers, and since 1861 a gun has been fired from the castle as the foggy-day version of the same signal. Both still happen. Stand on Calton Hill, watch the ball fall, wait about three seconds, then hear the gun — sound being slow and the castle being a kilometre away. Half of Princes Street flinches. I still do.

4. 04

   Dean Village and the Water of Leith walkway

   Ten minutes downhill from Princes Street·Late afternoon, for the light in the valley

   Eleven watermills once ground the city's grain in this hollow, and the buildings are still standing — restored, lived in, and slightly unreal, in a valley you drop into from Telford's bridge with no warning at all. The walkway follows the river out towards Leith, past St Bernard's Well and the modern art galleries. I have never once managed the full eight kilometres to the harbour without stopping, which is either a stamina problem or a very well-sited pub.

5. 05

   A session at Sandy Bell's

   Forrest Road, Old Town·Evenings; sit where you can see the corner

   Small bar with a serious claim on the Scottish folk revival: people have been playing traditional music in the corner here since the late 1940s, and Billy Connolly and Barbara Dickson were regulars long before either was famous. No stage, no tickets, no amplification. Musicians arrive, sit down, start. You stop talking when the fiddle starts, a rule I worked out on my second visit rather than my first, having spent the first one being an idiot at volume.

6. 06

   South Queensferry, under the Forth Bridge

   Half an hour out of Waverley by train or bus·A clear day; the bridge is best in low sun

   Nineteenth-century cantilever railway bridge, opened in 1890, painted the particular red that gave English a phrase for a job that never ends, and a UNESCO site since 2015. From the little high street underneath it the scale refuses to compute — trains cross constantly and look like models. The Hawes Inn on the waterfront is where Stevenson set the kidnapping in Kidnapped and is still a working pub, which is a continuity Split keeps failing to manage with its own literary addresses.