Salisbury Crags & the Radical Road
Why is it significant?
Walk along the top of Salisbury Crags, keeping a sensible distance from the edge, and look down. A sheer wall of dark rock drops away below you, and beyond it the whole Old Town is laid out like a model: the castle on its rock, the crown spire of St Giles', the roofs tumbling down the Royal Mile.
Key Facts
| Place | Salisbury Crags & the Radical Road |
|---|---|
| Address | Salisbury Crags, Queen's Drive, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh EH8, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.94600, -3.17400 |
| Part of Walk | Climbing a Volcano: Arthur's Seat & Holyrood Park, Edinburgh |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along the top of Salisbury Crags, keeping a sensible distance from the edge, and look down. A sheer wall of dark rock drops away below you, and beyond it the whole Old Town is laid out like a model: the castle on its rock, the crown spire of St Giles', the roofs tumbling down the Royal Mile. Few cities let you stand on a cliff ten minutes' walk from their parliament.
The cliff is made of dolerite, a hard volcanic rock that never actually reached the surface. More than 300 million years ago, molten rock forced its way sideways between layers of sediment and cooled there, deep underground, into a thick sheet that geologists call a sill. Ages of erosion, and finally the grinding of ice-age glaciers, stripped away the softer rocks above it. What was once buried is now the skyline.
The crags were once bigger than they are today. For centuries their tough stone was quarried, and in the eighteenth century much of it was shipped south to pave the streets of London. The quarrymen bit so deeply into the cliff that Edinburgh protested, and after a long legal battle the quarrying was finally stopped in the early nineteenth century. The scoops and ledges along the face are their scars.
Down at the foot of the cliff runs a path called the Radical Road. It was built in 1820, after a year of unrest and an armed rising in the west of Scotland known as the Radical War. Unemployed weavers from the west were given work making it, and the idea, so the story goes, came from Walter Scott, who loved to walk here. Because of the danger of falling rock, the Radical Road has been closed to walkers since 2018, so enjoy it from above.
Look east now, into the long green hollow between the crags and the main hill. That is Hunter's Bog, and soon you will walk through it. First follow the cliff-top path south, as it slowly drops towards the road, to the far end of the crags, where a small patch of rock changed the history of science.