Scenic Place in Edinburgh

Leith is the historic port district of Edinburgh, a place with its own strong identity separate from the medieval Old Town on the hill above and now one of the most vibrant and interesting neighbourhoods in Scotland. The harbour has served Edinburgh's maritime needs for over eight centuries and has handled everything from medieval trade with the Baltic and Netherlands to warships, emigrants and whisky exports in more recent centuries. Today Leith's waterfront has been transformed into a bustling destination while retaining strong connections to its working port heritage. The most famous vessel berthed at Leith is the Royal Yacht Britannia, the decommissioned royal yacht that served as the floating residence of the Queen and the Royal Family from 1953 until 1997. Now permanently moored at Ocean Terminal, the yacht offers one of the most intimate and genuinely fascinating royal experiences available anywhere in Britain. Self-guided tours with audio commentary allow visitors to explore the royal apartments, the state dining room and the engine room, giving a vivid sense of life aboard the yacht during state visits and royal holidays. The scale and detail of the royal family's personal quarters, rather modest compared to expectations, is often the element that surprises visitors most. The Shore, Leith's historic waterfront street, runs along the Water of Leith from the harbour and is lined with some of Edinburgh's best independent restaurants, bars and cafés. The area's maritime character has been preserved in the old trading warehouses and merchants' buildings along the water, and the mix of working port infrastructure, converted heritage buildings and contemporary restaurants gives Leith a character distinct from anywhere else in the city. The story of Leith's role in Scotland's history is told at the Leith Archive and through various interpretation boards along the waterfront walk. The area was technically a separate burgh from Edinburgh until it was absorbed into the city in 1920 and still retains a sense of independent identity that its residents tend to cultivate carefully. Mary Queen of Scots arrived in Scotland for the last time at Leith Harbour in 1561, and the area witnessed some of the most dramatic moments in Edinburgh's complex political history. The Water of Leith Walkway follows the river from the harbour upstream through the city, providing a peaceful urban walking route that passes through the Dean Village, the Botanic Gardens and eventually reaches the Pentland Hills. Combined with a visit to the harbour, it provides a rewarding day exploring Edinburgh's neighbourhoods away from the Royal Mile.

Aberlady Bay on the south shore of the Firth of Forth in East Lothian was the first statutory Local Nature Reserve declared in Britain, a designation made in 1952 that recognised the exceptional ecological importance of this sheltered bay and its combination of intertidal mudflats, saltmarsh, dune grassland and scrub. The reserve provides outstanding birdwatching throughout the year and the combination of the wildlife interest, the coastal walking and the views across the Forth to Fife and the Lomond Hills makes Aberlady one of the most rewarding natural heritage sites on the East Lothian coast. The mudflats and sandflats of the bay provide feeding habitat for waders and wildfowl in numbers that make it one of the most important estuarine habitats on the Firth of Forth. Pink-footed geese arrive in autumn in large flocks on their way from Iceland to wintering grounds further south, and the bay supports a wide variety of wader species throughout the migratory season. The dune grassland behind the bay supports a diverse plant community and the scrub provides cover for a range of passerine migrants in spring and autumn. The historic connection of Aberlady with the early aviation history of Scotland is provided by the remains of the World War II airfield on the land behind the reserve, and the Aberlady Parish Church with its unusual round apse tower adds an architectural dimension to a visit that is principally focused on the wildlife and coastal scenery.

The Royal Mile is the historic spine of Edinburgh's Old Town, a succession of streets connecting Edinburgh Castle at the top of the volcanic crag to the Palace of Holyroodhouse at the foot, descending approximately a mile in length and flanked throughout by a density of historic architecture, closes, courtyards and buildings that constitute one of the most concentrated collections of urban heritage in Europe. The streets of the Royal Mile, named from top to bottom the Castlehill, Lawnmarket, High Street and Canongate, together form the core of Edinburgh's UNESCO World Heritage Site and define the character and identity of one of the world's great historic cities. The architecture along the Royal Mile reflects eight centuries of urban development within the extraordinary constraints of the ridge between the castle crag and the Palace. The medieval street pattern, in which the principal street was flanked by long narrow plots running back from the frontage on either side, encouraged the construction of tall, narrow tenements that rose to remarkable heights as the population grew and the available land within the town walls was fully occupied. By the seventeenth century Edinburgh had some of the tallest residential buildings in Europe, the model for the later tenement form of Scottish urban housing that characterises the cities of central Scotland to the present day. The individual buildings along the Mile include John Knox House, the Writers' Museum, the Museum of Edinburgh in Huntly House, St Giles' Cathedral, the Mercat Cross and the Parliament House, all providing layers of historical and cultural association that make the Royal Mile far more than a tourist shopping street. The closes running off the main street on both sides, some preserved as heritage sites and others still in everyday use, provide glimpses into the layered history of the Old Town. The Scottish Parliament building at the foot of the Mile, opened in 2004, provides a striking architectural contrast to its historic surroundings.

Rosslyn Chapel near Roslin in Midlothian is one of the most elaborately decorated medieval buildings in Scotland, a small fifteenth-century collegiate church whose extraordinary carved stonework covering virtually every internal surface with biblical scenes, foliage, figures and symbolic motifs has fascinated scholars, occultists and ordinary visitors for centuries. The chapel was built by William Sinclair, first Earl of Orkney, between 1446 and 1484, and the density and quality of its carved decoration, far exceeding anything else produced in Scotland in this period, reflects both the exceptional wealth of the Sinclair family and an ambition in stone carving that remains difficult to fully explain. The chapel achieved worldwide celebrity with the publication of Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code in 2003 and the subsequent film, both of which featured the chapel as the hiding place of the Holy Grail and wove an elaborate conspiracy narrative around its unusual decorative programme. The resulting surge of visitor interest transformed the chapel from a moderately visited Scottish heritage site into an internationally famous destination, bringing visitors from across the world who may or may not accept the novel's fictional framing but who find the chapel's extraordinary carved interior compelling for its genuine historical and artistic qualities. The Apprentice Pillar, the most celebrated of the chapel's carved columns, is a pillar of extraordinary ornamental complexity whose spiral bands of intertwining foliage rise from its base to an elaborately carved capital. The legend attached to it, in which the master mason killed his apprentice in a rage of jealousy upon returning from Rome to find the pillar completed to a standard he could not have achieved himself, is a Victorian invention but captures something of the genuine wonder that the column produces in observers. The surrounding Roslin Glen provides pleasant walking and the ruined Roslin Castle adds further medieval interest to the area.

Arthur's Seat is the highest point in Edinburgh and one of the most prominent urban hills in Europe, an ancient volcano rising 251 metres above the city centre within Holyrood Park that provides panoramic views across Edinburgh, the Firth of Forth and the surrounding Lothian landscape from a summit accessible to walkers of all abilities within minutes of the city's major attractions. The hill takes its name from the legendary King Arthur, one of several locations across Britain that claim association with the mythological figure, and the combination of the dramatic volcanic topography, the panoramic views and the historical connections of the park make Arthur's Seat one of Edinburgh's most rewarding outdoor experiences. The volcanic geology of Arthur's Seat is one of its most interesting features. The hill is the eroded remnant of a volcano that was active approximately 350 million years ago and whose lavas and intrusive igneous rocks were sculpted by glacial erosion during successive ice ages into the craggy profile visible today. The Salisbury Crags, the prominent line of dolerite cliffs below the main summit, were the subject of the geological observations made by James Hutton in the late eighteenth century that helped establish the science of geology and the concept of deep geological time, making this hill one of the birthplaces of modern earth science. The summit of Arthur's Seat is reached by several routes, the most popular ascending from St Margaret's Loch through the Gutted Haddie gully to the summit ridge, a walk of approximately forty-five minutes from the Holyrood Palace car park. The panorama from the top on a clear day is extraordinary, encompassing the full extent of Edinburgh from the castle to the Firth of Forth, the Bass Rock offshore and the hills of Fife across the water.