Edinburgh, Scotland
A fortress on the stump of a dead volcano, with cliffs on three sides and a city at its feet. For nine hundred years whoever held this rock held Scotland, and so it was attacked more often than any other place in Britain. Inside the walls are a chapel of the 1100s, the crown of the Scottish kings, and a gun that is still fired at one o'clock on six days of the week.
Photo: 瑞丽江的河水, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are in a long green garden in the bottom of a valley, with a railway running through it. Above you on one side is a cliff of black rock, eighty metres high, with trees clinging to its foot. Along the top of the cliff runs a line of grey walls, and behind the walls are roofs, a tower and a flag.
The oldest building up there is a chapel no bigger than a living room. It was built about 1130 by a king in memory of his mother. In China the Southern Song (1127–1279) had just begun, and the general Yue Fei was fighting the invaders from the north.
One ticket covers everything inside the walls, including the museums. The parade ground in front of the gate is free.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The Esplanade and the gatehouse | Free |
| The One o'Clock Gun | Included; fired at 13:00, not on Sundays |
| St Margaret's Chapel | Included |
| Mons Meg | Included |
| The Royal Palace and the Honours of Scotland | Included |
| The Great Hall | Included |
| The Scottish National War Memorial | Included |
| The Prisons of War | Included |
| The National War Museum | Included; shorter hours |
The rock is the hard core of a volcano that died about 350 million years ago. Ice later ground away the soft ground round it and left a ramp of rubble on the east side only. The main street of old Edinburgh runs down that ramp. Every attacker had to come up it.
Scottish kings lived on the summit from the eleventh century. England took the castle and lost it again more than once. Scots besieged other Scots in it. The last attempt was in 1745. By its keepers' count it has been under siege more often than anywhere else in Britain.
It is still an army post. Soldiers guard the gate, and a gun is fired from the wall each day.
"It is one castle." It is a small town of buildings from eight centuries: a chapel, a palace, a hall, barracks, a hospital, prisons, and museums. Very little of what you see from below is older than 1570.
"The Stone of Destiny is here." The stone on which Scottish kings were crowned was kept here from 1996 to 2024. It is now in a museum in Perth.
"The gun is fired at noon." It is fired at one o'clock, on every day but Sundays, Good Friday and Christmas Day, and has been since 1861.
"You can buy a ticket at the gate." On busy days you cannot. When the day's tickets are sold out on the website, none are sold at the castle.
The route climbs in a spiral from the gate to the summit. Allow at least two hours, which is what the castle itself advises.
The flat open space in front of the gate was made in 1753 as a drill ground. Each August stands for nearly nine thousand people are built on it, and military bands from many countries march here by night.
Look over the wall on your right. That drop is why the castle is here.
The first gate, with its ditch and bridge, looks the oldest and is the newest. It was built in 1888 to make the castle look more like a castle. The two bronze men beside it are Robert the Bruce and William Wallace, who led the Scots against England about 1300.
The real gate is the tall tower a little further up, built in the 1570s after a siege had knocked down everything in front of it. It once had heavy doors and an iron grating that dropped from above.
Just inside, on the left, seventy steep steps go straight up to the summit. This was the only way up in the Middle Ages. The road that curves round to the right was cut later, to bring up heavy guns.
The row of black cannon points over the gardens at the new part of the city. In 1745 the castle's guns fired into the old town, which the army of the prince called Bonnie Prince Charlie had occupied. He held the town for six weeks and never took the castle.
A little further along is a modern field gun. At one o'clock a gunner fires a single blank shot. The custom began in 1861 so that ships in the sea-inlet to the north could set their clocks, on days when fog hid the signal on the hill across the town.
On the highest point of the rock is a plain stone box with a round arch inside, carved in zigzags. King David I built it about 1130 for his mother Margaret, an English princess who had died in the castle in 1093. It is the oldest building in Edinburgh.
In 1314 the Scots took the castle back by climbing the north cliff at night, and their king ordered every building pulled down so that the English could never use it again. Only this chapel was spared. Later it was a gunpowder store, and nobody remembered what it was until 1845.
Outside the chapel door is a gun that weighs six tonnes. It was made in 1449 in the town of Mons, in what is now Belgium, and given to the king of Scotland in 1457, the year a deposed Ming emperor took back his throne in Beijing. It threw a stone ball of 150 kilograms about three kilometres. It was so heavy that on the road it covered only five kilometres a day.
In 1681 it was fired for a prince's birthday and the barrel burst. You can see the split iron hoops near the back.
The great curved wall that you saw from the street is a gun platform, built in the 1570s. It is wrapped round the ruin of a tower thirty metres high that stood here for two hundred years and was shot to pieces in a siege in 1573. The lower rooms of the old tower were found again inside the wall in 1912.
The square at the top was the heart of the royal castle. On its east side is the palace. Over the door are the gilded letters M and H, for Mary and her husband Henry, and the date 1566.
The room where her son was born is on the ground floor. It is barely big enough for a bed, with a painted wooden ceiling. In China it was the last year of the Jiajing emperor, the year the official Hai Rui sent him a famous letter of blame.
Upstairs are the crown, the sceptre and the sword. The crown was remade in 1540 with gold dug in Scotland. They are the oldest royal regalia in Britain, because the English ones were melted down in 1649. These were smuggled out of a castle under siege and buried under the floor of a village church.
On the south side of the square is the hall King James IV finished in 1511 for feasts and for receiving ambassadors. The walls are hung with swords, pikes and armour arranged in patterns, as army storekeepers of the 1800s liked to do.
Look up. The timber roof is the one the king's carpenters made. It was hidden for two centuries above the floors of a barracks, which is why it was not burned or replaced.
To the right of the fireplace, high up, is a small barred opening. From behind it the king could listen to what was said in his hall.
The north side of the square is a memorial opened in 1927 to the Scots who died in the First World War; the dead of later wars have been added. Their names are written in books that anyone may open. At the far end a steel box holding a full list of the names stands on a piece of the bare rock, which comes up through the floor.
Under the hall are stone vaults where prisoners of war were kept from 1757 to 1815: French, Spanish, Dutch, Americans. They slept in hammocks, carved ships from the bones in their soup, and cut their names in the doors. In 1811 forty-nine of them got out through a hole in the wall and down the rock.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| about 1130 | The chapel is built | The first years of the Southern Song in China |
| 1314 | The Scots climb the cliff and retake the castle | The Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) in China brings back the civil service examinations |
| 1457 | The great gun arrives from Burgundy | A deposed Ming emperor retakes his throne in Beijing; four years after the fall of Constantinople |
| 1566 | A future king of Scotland and England is born in the palace | The last year of the Jiajing emperor of the Ming |
| 1573 | The longest siege ends; the tower is destroyed | The first year of the Wanli emperor |
| 1707 | Scotland and England are joined; the crown is locked in a chest | The Kangxi reign of the Qing |
| 1818 | Walter Scott finds the crown | The Jiaqing reign of the Qing (1644–1912); three years after Waterloo |
| 1861 | The one o'clock gun is first fired | The Xianfeng emperor dies; the American Civil War begins |
| 1927 | The war memorial opens | The sixteenth year of the Republic of China |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Long ago a tunnel was found under the castle, running down towards the palace at the other end of the town. A boy was sent in with his pipes, to play as he walked so that men above could follow the sound. Half-way down the hill the music stopped. He was never found, and on quiet nights his pipes are heard under the street.
Source: Edinburgh street lore, in print since the nineteenth century
In 1650 a sentry saw a drummer without a head beating his drum along the wall. Soon afterwards Cromwell's army came. The drum is said to be heard whenever the castle is about to be attacked.
Source: Scottish ghost lore
In the days of the ancient kings, their daughters were kept on this rock, out of danger, until they were married. Old charters do call the place the Castle of the Maidens.
Source: The name Castrum Puellarum is in documents of the twelfth century; the story was told to explain it
The great gun was forged by a village blacksmith and his seven sons for the king's siege of a rebel castle, and named Meg after the smith's loud-voiced wife.
Source: A tale of south-west Scotland made popular by Walter Scott; the accounts of the Duke of Burgundy show it was made at Mons
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The castle's own site (edinburghcastle.scot), read in November 2026 for prices, hours and tours.
Checked 2026-11-12
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