Portrait of a park: the drama and delight of Edinburgh’s Holyrood Park

Is there any other city that can boast a park as rich in landscape and history as Edinburgh? The grand green expanse of Holyrood Park around the 251m-high mini-mountain of Arthur’s Seat lies just 15 minutes’ walk from the Scottish capital’s main railway station. But its 259 hectares are an otherworld of geological, archaeological and anthropological drama and delight.

Here you can find wild grass meadows and precipitous cliffs, boggy glens and silvery lochs, a rocky peak and secret paths through fragrant gorse. And all of it layered with the traces of thousands of years of human activity, from Bronze Age farm terraces and Iron Age forts to medieval ruins and 19th-century quarries.

Perhaps the finest approach is by the road past the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the royal residence and former abbey from which the park takes its name. Here, the great angled band of rock that forms the Salisbury Crags juts skyward, dwarfing the surrounding city. Circle around the sloping back of the crags and up into the glen that divides them from the peak of Arthur’s Seat and suddenly Edinburgh seems far away.

One of the joys of Holyrood is that it has many spots where you can imagine you are deep in the Scottish mountains. The sense of seclusion — along with a once-rich stock of deer for the hunt — was surely part of the area’s appeal to Scotland’s King James V, who walled it off as a royal park in 1541.

Walk on up towards the peak and you will pass Hunter’s Bog, dammed by James’s daughter Mary, Queen of Scots later in the 16th century to create a pool where a naval re-enactment could be staged for the pleasure of her court. Two hundred later, the slopes above became a brief refuge for Highland soldiers who had enlisted to help defend Britain against French invasion, but mutinied on word they were to be sent to serve overseas. Though supplied with food by sympathetic Edinburgh residents and encouraged by bagpipe music played from the path now known as Piper’s Walk, the Highlanders were persuaded to return to the ranks on assurance they would only be despatched to Guernsey in the English Channel. Sadly the assurances proved empty: a few years later they were indeed sent to India, a journey many did not survive.

The final stretch to the peak is steep enough to make even a practised hillwalker feel a rush of satisfaction as the view opens up to a panorama of the surrounding city, its neighbouring hills and sea and, in the distance, real mountains. The properly fit take Arthur’s Seat at a run, a practice that appears to have roots at least as far back as 1661, when Mercurius Caledonius, an early newspaper, announced that six pregnant brewer women would race to the top for the prize of “a groaning cheese of one hundred pounds weight” and a bottle of whisky. In the 2017 film T2 Trainspotting, recovering addict Renton forces his friend Spud to run up the hill to show him there are alternatives to heroin. “Be addicted to something else,” Renton says.

Holyrood Park offers many more moderate challenges for runners. On winter evenings, their piercingly bright LED head torches twinkle from afar in shifting streams up and down the paths like some modern art installation. Many pound the Queen’s Drive, a 5km route also popular with cyclists that was laid out in the 1840s as part of landscaping ordered by the then royal consort Prince Albert. In summer, the park hums with more sedentary recreation. Families picnic, lovers stroll hand in hand, tourists snap like-worthy Instagram photos and clumps of young people party on cheap booze and pungent cannabis.

Much of the fun is weather-dependent, of course. The Edinburgh author Robert Louis Stevenson — an admirer of Arthur’s Seat — wrote that Scotland’s capital paid for its grand situation with “one of the vilest climates under heaven”. The park’s upper reaches are often scoured by cold horizontal rain that will test the snuggest waterproofs. Even a Scotch mist, as the old saying goes, will “wet an Englishman to the skin”.

Edinburgh’s weather is at least dynamic, however, and there is a silver-lining to such meteorological purgatory. Rain is often quickly followed by crisp sunshine that makes every blade of grass shimmer and casts bright rainbows across a still-grey sky. A blowy Boxing Day walk up Arthur’s Seat will clear any head befuddled by Christmas excess. The chilly haars, or sea fogs, that roll in from the North Sea blanket the park in a refreshing silence. On another day, you might be bathed in sunshine on the peak until a single dark rain cloud passes by, delivering a highly localised drenching to everything in its path. This is weather as theatre.

The challenging climate is a reminder that there has always been a wildness to Holyrood Park. Do not come here for tea shops. Prince Albert proposed a place of refreshment near the highest of the park’s lochs. But the scheme was abandoned after locals denounced it as “a cancer on the otherwise pure skin of the noble lion” and “a bloated pimple on a lady’s face”. Many of the park’s place names whisper of a darker side. While folk tales associate Arthur’s Seat with the resting place of the legendary king, some scholars have suggested the name stems from the Gaelic for “Height of the Arrows”. The hill’s earliest recorded name was Craggenemarf, or “Crag of the Dead”. On its southern side lies Murder Acre, where in 1677 soldiers bloodily suppressed an unruly crowd. Nearby Hangman’s Crag is reputedly where an ostracised city executioner took his own life.

The 19th-century author Walter Scott set a key scene of his novel Heart of Midlothian at a cairn near the ruin of the medieval St Anthony’s Chapel. The cairn, now moved closer to the park’s north-eastern entrance, was raised, as Scott wrote in a footnote, “in memory, and at the same time execration” of the brutal 1720 killing by one Nicol Muschet of his wife. Sadly, it was not the last misogynistic murder to blight the park. In 1972, a young German woman was shoved off Salisbury Crags by her Dutch husband on their wedding night. In 2023, Kashif Anwar from Leeds was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife Fawziyah Javed by pushing her off another cliff. Javed lived just long enough to tell a witness who had killed her.

For most people, however, the park is a place to celebrate life, not desecrate it. At sunset on a fine summer evening, the top of Salisbury Crags is lined with visitors from around the world admiring the view towards the imposing black basalt pedestal of Edinburgh’s Castle Rock.

Both crags and rock are relics of a great spasm of volcanic activity that roiled what were then tropical waters 325mn years ago. It was at Salisbury Crags that 18th-century geologist James Hutton found evidence of the geological processes that helped him discover “deep time”: the understanding that the earth is far older than western thinkers previously believed.

The site of Hutton’s discoveries became a tourist attraction in their own right, but anyone wanting to visit them these days must climb or skirt ugly metal fences set up by Historic Environment Scotland, the agency that manages Holyrood, which has blocked the route for more than five years because of concerns about rockfalls. Similar fencing has become a blight across Scotland’s heritage sites as HES struggles to fund or organise even high-priority maintenance.

In 2023, more than 3,600 people signed a petition calling for the reopening of the route, known as the Radical Road in homage to the politically disaffected weavers employed to build it in 1820. That project was instigated in part by Walter Scott, who in Heart of Midlothian reported that the scenic path along the base of the crags had “become totally impassable; a circumstance which, if true, reflects little credit on the taste of the Good Town or its leaders”. It is a reproof that Edinburgh’s heritage bosses might do well to remember.

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s upcoming guide to Edinburgh. To tell us your top insider tips for the city, email us at ftglobetrotter@ft.com