Arthur’s Seat is the highest point in a sprawling, 650-acre expanse of open crags, moorland and lochs in the centre of Edinburgh known as Holyrood Park. If such a site had existed in ancient Greece or India, you can be sure it would be encrusted with temples and marble-paved pathways. As it is, the route to the top – a typically Scottish mix of muddy paths and steep, rock steps – leads only to a trig point and metal-capped topograph. The miracle is that such wild land survives slap in the middle of one of the world’s most elegant cities.
Arthur’s Seat sees more than its fair share of walkers, joggers, dogs and camera toting tourists. Even so, a climb to the top is, whatever the famously unforgiving Scottish weather throws at you, always an event. There’s nothing quite as romantic as a view over a beautiful city, and few cities in the world are as exotic as this.
“Holyrood”, a former royal hunting reserve, probably derives its name from the old Scots for “Holy Cross”, a reference to a supposed fragment of the True Cross brought here by the mother of King David I in the early twelfth century. The relic later occupied pride of place in the Augustinian abbey King David founded in 1128 in the shadow of the hills. Holyrood lay beyond the protection of the city ramparts and was thus prone to repeated attacks by the invading English. Apart from the walls of the nave (which still stand), the rest of the building was comprehensively demolished in 1550, but by then the Scottish monarchs had already begun to favour the site as a residence instead of the windier heights of Edinburgh Castle.
Holyrood Palace (B) subsequently erected next to the ruined abbey was where Mary Queen of Scots spent six eventful years in the 1560s, during which time she married twice, and witnessed the murder of one of her closest friends and advisors, David Rizzio, who was brutally stabbed in her private apartments by a group led by her jealous husband, Lord Darnley. Although it ceased to be the permanent royal house when James VI left for London in 1603, successive monarchs have continued to use the palace, including Bonnie Prince Charlie, who held court here for five weeks en route to Derby in 1745.
Our walk begins opposite the entrance to Holyrood Palace, in front of the new Scottish Parliament Building (A). The brainchild of Catalan architect Enric Miralles, the innovative complex was intended to represent the relationship between the Scottish people and their natural environment. But since it was opened in 2004 – more than three years late, and £404 million over-budget – opinion has been divided between people who regard the building as sensational, and those who tend to consider the vast sum it cost as a waste of public funds. A recent poll designated the Scottish Parliament as the World’s Eighth Ugliest Building, but whether or not you like the architecture, you can’t fail to be impressed by its location, set against the spectacular rock wall of Salisbury Crags.
It was while scrutinizing the glaciated basalt cliffs of Salisbury Crags (C), which tower in a forbidding arc above Edinburgh’s old city, that local naturalist James Hutton (1726–97) realized the rocks must have been formed not by rainwater deposits, as theory at the time had it, but by molten matter forcing itself into gaps between older sedimentary layers. His eureka moment paved the way for later theories of “geological time”, and the birth of geology as a modern science.
At the base of the cliffs, where the crags give way to scree, a track known as the Radical Road stands as a reminder of a turbulent spell in Scottish history. In 1820, popular anger over the recession that followed the Napoleonic Wars turned into a full-blown rebellion (the so-called Radical War) when artisans marched for economic reform. It was to diffuse these tensions (and avoid what the establishment feared might be a repeat of the French Revolution) that Sir Walter Scott convinced the government to pay unemployed weavers to dig a cart track around the bottom of the crags.
Our route steers a more radical route still, along the precipitous top edge of Salisbury Crags to reach the cliffs’ culminating point – Cat Nick. Many would argue this summit, a spot favoured by suicide jumpers that falls to a near vertical, 46-metre/150-feet rock face on its western flank, affords a more impressive view than Arthur’s Seat itself, being closer to the city. It’s certainly a fine platform from which to pick out Edinburgh’s principal landmarks.
Dropping to the col connecting Salisbury Crags with the bigger hill behind (a pass known as “the Hause”), we next follow a flight of zigzagging stone steps up a steep, heavily eroded gulley known as Guttit Haddie (D) (Scots for “smoked haddock fillet”) – a nickname derived from a landslide in the eighteenth century which left a scar on the hillside resembling a filleted haddock. A final scramble at the hilltop brings you to the rocky crown of Arthur’s Seat (E) proper, revealing a stupendous view east across the Firth of the Forth to the open sea, with the distinctive conical profiles of Bass Rock and the Berwick Law dominating the mid-distance.
The name of the hill suggests an Arthurian connection. One of the earliest known references to the legendary king crops up in a sixth-century saga, Y Gododdin, thought to have been written in Edinburgh about the occupants of the castle, the Gododdins (or Votadini, as they were known to the Romans). A more plausible explanation lies in the Gaelic term ard-nasaid – “height of arrows” – a nod perhaps to the site’s strategic role in Medieval times. Traces of a ruined fort can still be discerned amid the rocks of Crow, the south easterly of Arthur’s Seat’s three summits.
While archeological remains underline the ancient military importance of the hilltop, Edinburgh’s inhabitants have in more recent centuries tended to associate the site less with historic events than with weird, and even supernatural ones. A particularly chilling evocation of the spooky side of the city crops up in the Gothic masterpiece by Edinburgh novelist James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). The sinner in question is a dour young religious fanatic called Robert Wringhim, who is incited by a mysterious doppelganger to murder his own half brother, George. A foggy morning on the summit of Arthur’s Seat is chosen for the grim deed. But just as Robert is about to push him over the cliffs, George spies a terrifying apparition projected on to the clouds below the crags. He turns in time to catch his brother, whom he chases down the hill screaming at the top of his voice.
Walk around the summit on a chilly autumn morning, with sun breaking through the mist, and you may well encounter a vision of precisely the same kind that inspired Hogg’s terrifying account: a Brocken spectre. Caused by sunlight casting a shadow onto cloud below a ridge, this peculiar light effect is a common occurrence on Arthur’s Seat.
Following in the footsteps of Hogg’s Justified Sinner, we descend the hill via its northern side down a narrow valley called Hunters Bog (aka “The Dry Dam”). The path brings you out alongside the skeleton of St Anthony’s Chapel (F). No-one knows for sure when this eerie structure was originally built, nor why, though it would almost certainly have been connected in some way to the nearby abbey. One theory holds that the building, dedicated to the patron saint of skin ailments, served as an annexe to the hospital at Leith, donated by James I in the fifteenth century for the treatment of a condition known as “St Anthony’s Fire”. The waters contained in a well nearby, still visible next to a large grey boulder, were believed to be curative.
An echo of this old belief survives in the adage, “if you wash your face in dew from Arthur’s Seat on the morning of May 1st you will be beautiful”. Large crowds used to gather for the annual “dew gathering”. “In the course of half an hour,” wrote an eyewitness in 1826, “the entire hill is a moving mass of all sorts and sizes. At the summit may be seen a company of bakers, and other craftsmen, dressed in kilts, dancing round a Maypole. On the more level part . . . is usually an itinerant vender of whiskey, or mountain (not May) dew, your approach to whom is always indicated by a number of ‘bodies’ carelessly lying across your path, not dead, but drunk.” Having died out in the 1930s, the event has seen a resurgence, though it’s more restrained than in centuries past.
The Seventeen Coffins - A strange, and rather unnerving discovery was made on Arthur’s Seat in 1836. While hunting rabbits in the rocks below the summit, a group of boys came across a collection of seventeen miniature coffins hidden in a hollow. Initially, witchcraft was suspected. The local press raved about “weird sisters . . . who retain the ancient power to work their spells of death by entombing the likenesses of those they wish to destroy”. It wasn’t long, however, before residents in the old city began to suspect the objects were related to the murders committed in the previous decade by Burke and Hare.
This infamous pair of Irish navvies had killed seventeen people in the slums of central Edinburgh, selling their corpses to Dr Robert Knox for dissection in his medical college. Burke had expressed some remorse after his trial, where he was sentenced to death. Perhaps the seventeen figurines had been carved by him to give his victims make-believe burials? Or maybe it was a friend or relative of the pair who knew about the murders and made the models to assuage their guilt at not exposing the crimes? In an attempt to solve the riddle once and for all, tests were recently carried out on DNA extracted from Burke’s skeleton, which is displayed in the Surgeon’s Hall on Edinburgh’s Nicolson Street (along with his death mask and a macabre set of objects made from his skin). Samples were also taken one of the miniature coffins. The results, however, proved inconclusive. Only eight of the figurines and their caskets have survived to the present day. Bought by the state in 1901, they’re now kept at the National Museum of Scotland, where they provide a great source of fascination for visiting school children.
The term panorama – from the Greek pan (“all”) horama (“view”) – was originally dreamed up by the itinerant Irish artist, Robert Barker in 1792, to describe his wide-angle images of Edinburgh.