North Bridge: The First View of Calton Hill
Why is it significant?
Stand on North Bridge, high above the glass roofs and railway tracks of Waverley Station, and look east. Beyond the station rises a green hill crowned with strange things: a broken Greek temple, a tower shaped like a telescope, a little round temple and the dome of an observatory.
Key Facts
| Place | North Bridge: The First View of Calton Hill |
|---|---|
| Address | North Bridge, Edinburgh EH1 1QN, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95090, -3.18800 |
| Part of Walk | Calton Hill, Edinburgh: Monuments, Martyrs and the Athens of the North |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on North Bridge, high above the glass roofs and railway tracks of Waverley Station, and look east. Beyond the station rises a green hill crowned with strange things: a broken Greek temple, a tower shaped like a telescope, a little round temple and the dome of an observatory. That is Calton Hill, and for the next couple of hours it is ours.
Before this bridge existed, Edinburgh was a city trapped on a ridge. Below you lay a marshy valley and the Nor' Loch, a polluted lake that served as moat, rubbish dump and, the old stories say, a place for testing suspected witches. In 1763 the Lord Provost, George Drummond, laid the foundation stone of a bridge to leap across it, the first step toward a new city on the fields to the north.
It did not go smoothly. In 1769, while still unfinished, part of the bridge collapsed, and five people were killed. It was repaired and finally opened in 1772, and the bridge you are standing on is its replacement, a steel structure from the 1890s built over the railway.
But once that link existed, everything changed. The New Town spread north, roads were cut east, and Calton Hill, which had been outside the city, a place of burial grounds, quarries and later a prison, was turned into a showpiece. In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh fell in love with the idea that it was the Athens of the North: a city of philosophers and scientists that deserved its own Acropolis. Over the next decades the hill collected monuments to an admiral, two philosophers, a poet and the dead of the Napoleonic wars.
Remember this view. From up there, later, you will look back at exactly the spot where you are standing now. Walk north off the bridge to the corner of Princes Street, where a domed building waits behind a bronze horseman.