Edinburgh's Christmas market doesn't set up in some neutral square. It wraps itself around the feet of a 200-foot Gothic spire built for a novelist, in a garden that used to be a lake of raw sewage.
That's the starting point for this self-guided Edinburgh Christmas walk: a short, steep climb from the Scott Monument through the market crowding Princes Street Gardens, up the Mound into the Old Town, and along the Royal Mile to the Castle gates. None of it needs a ticket booked in advance, most of it is free just to walk through, and the whole thing opens for the season on November 14.
A spire built for a man who didn't want statues of himself
The Scott Monument went up between 1840 and 1844 to honor Sir Walter Scott, built from a design its architect, a joiner's son with no formal training named George Meikle Kemp, won in open competition over established names. Kemp died before it was finished, drowning in a canal on his way home one foggy night. Climb it and you'll pass 64 small carved figures from Scott's own novels on the way up a staircase so narrow in places that two people can't pass.
The market standing in the writer's own garden
Edinburgh's Christmas market takes over East Princes Street Gardens, the lawn directly below the monument, from November 14 through January 3, free to walk into at any hour between 10am and 10pm. The bigger fairground rides, including the Christmas Big Wheel, sit one garden over to the west and charge per ride. The gardens themselves were a reservoir of the Old Town's waste until the 1820s, drained and planted only after the New Town's sewers took over the job.
Go in the first hour after the 10am opening if you want the stalls without the queue for the Big Wheel. With Urban Tales running, the Scott Monument's story plays automatically as you pass it, so you're not reading a plaque with cold hands.
A hill built out of the Old Town's own rubble
From the market, the Mound climbs south toward the Old Town — a street that didn't exist until the 1780s, when builders digging the foundations of the new Georgian streets needed somewhere to dump the spoil. Over the next few decades, around two million cartloads of earth and rubble turned a bog at the base of the castle rock into solid ground, now carrying the National Gallery buildings and a steady stream of foot traffic straight up to the Royal Mile.
One Scots mile, and the alleys most people walk straight past
At the top of the Mound, turn right onto the Royal Mile, the roughly 1.8km spine connecting the Castle to Holyrood Palace — close enough to the old Scots mile, an obsolete unit of measure, that the name stuck. The closes branching off either side — narrow stone passages barely wide enough for two — are where most of the street's actual history hides. One of them, Mary King's Close, got built over and sealed up in the 17th century and now runs underneath the current street rather than beside it; even a quick look down one of the open closes on the walk up is worth the detour.
The rock the castle had no choice but to use
The Royal Mile ends at the Castle Esplanade, and the castle behind it sits on the solidified plug of a volcano that last erupted around 340 million years ago — the only bedrock for miles solid and tall enough to defend. People have lived on that rock since roughly 850 BC. Every day but Sunday, a gun still fires from the castle walls at exactly one o'clock, a tradition that started in 1861 so ships on the Firth of Forth could set their clocks by it.
By the time you're standing at the esplanade looking back down the Mile toward the market lights, you've climbed through about three centuries of Edinburgh's engineering and one of its better ghost stories, in under two kilometers. The whole route is walkable without rushing in well under an hour, longer if the market or the closes slow you down, which they should. For more on what Urban Tales covers nearby, see the full list of cities the app supports.
Edinburgh's Christmas walk: Scott Monument to the Castle
- 1Scott Monument287 steps up a Gothic spire built for a novelist
- 2Edinburgh's Christmas MarketSet up in the garden right under the monument, Nov 14 to Jan 3
- 3The MoundA hill built from roughly two million cartloads of Old Town rubble
- 4Royal MileAbout one Scots mile, lined with narrow closes
- 5Edinburgh CastleBuilt on the plug of a volcano extinct for 340 million years
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