Edinburgh Castle

Edinburgh Castle is less a building than a crown worn by a rock. Castle Rock is the plug of a volcano that went quiet some 350 million years ago: hard dolerite that the ice sheets could not grind away, leaving cliffs up to 80 metres high on three sides and a single gentle tail of rock running east. That tail became the Royal Mile, and the whole Old Town grew down it like a spine. Excavations in the 1990s found traces of settlement from the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age, and the rock has been a royal stronghold since the time of Malcolm III in the eleventh century, which makes it a strong candidate for the longest continuously occupied site in Scotland.

What survives on the summit is a layered record of who needed it and why. The oldest roof on the rock covers St Margaret's Chapel, a tiny Romanesque room from the reign of David I in the twelfth century, one of the very few buildings of that age left in any Scottish castle. Around it come the Royal Palace, begun in the fifteenth century, and the Great Hall of the early 1500s with its hammerbeam roof. The great curved wall of the Half Moon Battery, raised between 1573 and 1588 after the Lang Siege had shattered the medieval David's Tower, is what gives the castle its brooding profile from Princes Street. Historians have counted some 26 sieges in roughly 1,100 years, which goes some way to explaining why so much of the place looks rebuilt in a hurry.

Inside, the castle keeps the objects that carry the weight of Scottish statehood. The Crown Room, built in 1615, holds the Honours of Scotland and, since its return in 1996, the Stone of Destiny on which kings were inaugurated. On the battlements sits Mons Meg, a colossal siege gun forged in Flanders in 1449 for Philip the Good of Burgundy and given to James II in 1457. The One O'Clock Gun has been fired as a time signal for ships in the Firth of Forth since 1861. Quieter, and the most moving room on the rock, is the Scottish National War Memorial by Sir Robert Lorimer, opened in 1927 in a converted barrack block, its rolls holding well over a hundred thousand names from the First World War and tens of thousands more from the Second.

Look outwards as well as in. From the Argyle and Mills Mount batteries the view runs across the New Town grid to the Firth of Forth and the hills of Fife, and the esplanade in front of the gatehouse becomes, each August, the arena of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

Getting there

The castle stands at the top of the Royal Mile in the centre of Edinburgh. Waverley, the city's main railway station, is a short but steady uphill walk away; Haymarket station is an alternative from the west. Edinburgh Airport (EDI) is about 11 km to the west, linked to the city centre by tram and by the Airlink 100 express bus to Waverley Bridge. There is no public parking at the castle itself; the nearest car park is at Castle Terrace.