The Writers' Museum & Makars' Court

Why is it significant?

Step through the narrow passage of Lady Stair's Close and the noise of the Royal Mile drops away. In front of you stands a stone house of 1622 with a twisting stair tower, and under your feet the flagstones are carved with words. Read them as you walk.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step through the narrow passage of Lady Stair's Close and the noise of the Royal Mile drops away. In front of you stands a stone house of 1622 with a twisting stair tower, and under your feet the flagstones are carved with words. Read them as you walk. Each one is a line by a Scottish writer, from medieval poets to authors who are still alive. In 2004 Edinburgh became the world's first UNESCO City of Literature, and there is no better doorway into that story than this one.

This courtyard is Makars' Court. Makar is the old Scots word for a poet, literally a maker, and Scotland's national poet still carries the title today. The house is the Writers' Museum, dedicated to three giants: Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. On your way in you passed Gladstone's Land, a merchant's tenement of the early seventeenth century, six storeys of stone piled above a street-level arcade. That is how the Edinburgh of these writers actually lived: stacked up in towers, rich and poor on the same stair.

In November 1786 a young farmer from Ayrshire arrived in town with a book of poems that had just made him famous. Robert Burns lodged in a close that stood right here, sharing a room, and even a bed, with a friend from home. Within weeks the finest drawing rooms of Edinburgh were competing for him, and a new Edinburgh edition of his poems appeared in 1787. A plaque at the corner of the close remembers his first lodging.

The house has its own tale. Its name comes from Elizabeth, Dowager Countess of Stair, a celebrated beauty of the early eighteenth century. The story goes that during her first, unhappy marriage, a fortune teller showed her, in a magic mirror, her absent husband about to marry another woman abroad. Walter Scott, who never wasted a good legend, turned it into a short story, My Aunt Margaret's Mirror.

Inside, among portraits, manuscripts and first editions, there is a heavy wooden cabinet said to have stood in the childhood bedroom of Robert Louis Stevenson. It was made by a respectable Edinburgh cabinetmaker whose name you will hear again later on this walk. Leave the court, cross the Lawnmarket, and take the short flight of steps called the Upper Bow down onto the terrace above Victoria Street.