Edinburgh LandscapeScotland, United Kingdom Gaelic Dun Eideann

Edinburgh occupies some 7 miles (11 km) of north-facing slope between the Pentland Hills and the broad Firth of Forth estuary, where it merges with the once-independent seaport of Leith. Upthrusts of lava punctuate this slope. One of them, called Arthur’s Seat, the centrepiece of the royal park, has an elevation of 823 feet (251 metres) and dominates the city’s southeastern flank. The valleys between these striking hills were scoured deep and clean by glacial action in the Pleistocene Epoch. Edinburgh has been built on top of and around these obstacles so that the nearer one comes to the city centre, the more spectacular is the juxtaposition of natural and built environment, with terraces of stone confronting soaring thrust.

At the city’s core is the Old Town’s Castle Rock, a plug of black basalt sealing the vent of an extinct volcano. It stands 250 feet (76 metres) above the valley floor and is crowned by the famous Edinburgh Castle, which, subtly floodlit every night, stirs even the habituated townsfolk. Glacial ice once flowed from the west and around the Castle Rock’s flanks, depositing the accumulated debris of a lateral moraine east of the rock to create a crag and tail formation. Along the crest of this tail, and down its steep sides, the Old Town was built from the 12th century onward.

Some 600 feet (180 metres) north of the Castle Rock, across the valley that is now Princes Street Gardens, lies the New Town, a district that was planned and built in successive phases between 1767 and 1833. It offers a dignified tribute to the international taste of the Enlightenment and to the surveyor’s set square. Its design was overly regular to begin with, but later developments—as can be seen at the west end of Princes Street—paid more respect to natural contours and softened the regimentation of the right angle with curves and crescents. The New Town’s northwestern boundary is roughly the line of Edinburgh’s only substantial stream, the Water of Leith. The stream’s brief course from the Pentlands to the sea provided power for the mills of a series of villages—Dalry, Dean, Stockbridge, Silvermills, and Canonmills—that experienced significant growth from the early 17th century onward. These villages, which sprang up largely as industrial centres with paper and textile mills, are now embedded in the 19th-century matrix of the town, providing fashionable, bijou residences.