Greenside: The Hollow Under the Hill
Why is it significant?
At the foot of the hill's northern slope, a church with a square Gothic tower stands where the grass meets the long stone frontage of Royal Terrace. Around it the ground folds into a hollow, and for once the city feels like it has a back garden.
Key Facts
| Place | Greenside: The Hollow Under the Hill |
|---|---|
| Address | Greenside Parish Church, Royal Terrace, Edinburgh EH7 5AB, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95700, -3.18210 |
| Part of Walk | Calton Hill, Edinburgh: Monuments, Martyrs and the Athens of the North |
| Generated | Generated |
At the foot of the hill's northern slope, a church with a square Gothic tower stands where the grass meets the long stone frontage of Royal Terrace. Around it the ground folds into a hollow, and for once the city feels like it has a back garden.
This hollow is Greenside, and it is one of the oldest named places around Calton Hill. In the Middle Ages, long before any terrace existed, the natural slope made a kind of open-air amphitheatre outside the city walls, and Edinburgh used it as a playfield for tournaments, archery and performances.
In 1554, the story recorded by the chroniclers goes, Sir David Lyndsay's play Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis was performed here before the Queen Regent, Mary of Guise. It was a fierce satire on greedy clergy, corrupt lords and the sufferings of ordinary people, and it lasted for hours. A few years later, Scotland had its Reformation, and some people have wondered ever since how much that afternoon on the grass had to do with it.
Greenside had a darker chapter as well. A Carmelite friary stood here for a short time before the Reformation, and in the 1590s the site became a hospital for lepers, kept strictly apart from the town. The old records describe harsh rules for the inmates, and a gallows set up nearby as a warning to anyone who broke them. This was the edge of Edinburgh, where the city put what it feared.
The church in front of you came much later, in the 1830s, as Playfair's new terraces began to wrap around the hill and the slope filled with respectable households who needed a parish of their own. From the hollow of plays and lepers to a quiet Victorian kirk: Calton Hill has always changed its character faster than its stones suggest. Now turn east and walk the full length of Royal Terrace, keeping the trees of the hill on your right.