Climbing a Volcano: Arthur's Seat & Holyrood Park, Edinburgh

From the Scottish Parliament and James Hutton's deep time to Salisbury Crags, hidden Hunter's Bog, the 251-metre summit of an ancient volcano and the lochs of Duddingston village

Edinburgh · 12 stops · 28 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Scottish Parliament: A Building That Grows Out of the Hill

Scottish Parliament, Horse Wynd, Edinburgh EH99 1SP, UK

Stand in front of the Scottish Parliament and look up, past its strange, leaf-shaped roofs, to the great green shoulder of rock rising behind it. That is the whole idea of this building. Its Catalan architect, Enric Miralles, wanted a parliament that seemed to grow out of the land itself, and from here you can see the landscape he was talking to: the cliffs of Salisbury Crags, and behind them Arthur's Seat.

Look at the details. The roofs are often compared to upturned boats pulled up on a beach, or to leaves, depending on whom you ask. The landscaped grounds sweep towards the park in long curving strips of grass and concrete, meant to pull the wild hillside right into the city. Inside, each member's office has a little window seat, a bay for thinking, with a view of the old town.

The building had a difficult birth. Scotland voted for its own parliament in 1997, and the members first met in 1999, in a borrowed assembly hall on the Mound. Here, the costs climbed from early estimates in the tens of millions to more than four hundred million pounds, and Miralles died in 2000, years before the building was finished. When it opened in 2004, many Scots were furious... and many visitors were enchanted.

The site matters too. You are standing at the edge of Holyrood Park, a royal park of around two hundred and sixty hectares, a slice of wild Scotland dropped into a capital city. Kings hunted here in the Middle Ages, and in the sixteenth century the park was enclosed with a wall. Its hills, crags and lochs are the remains of a volcano that erupted some 350 million years ago, shaped later by the ice.

This walk climbs that volcano. It is a real climb, more than two hundred metres up from where you stand, on paths that can be steep, rocky and slippery after rain, so wear proper shoes and take your time. First, cross the road to the white, tent-like roof just to the south, where the story of the rocks begins with a man who looked at them differently.
2. Our Dynamic Earth & James Hutton's Deep Time

Our Dynamic Earth, 112-116 Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AS, UK

In front of you, a white roof stretches over steel masts like a giant tent pitched at the foot of the cliffs. This is Our Dynamic Earth, a science centre that opened in 1999, and its choice of site is no accident. A few streets west of here, on St John's Hill, lived the man who taught the world to read time in stone.

James Hutton was born in Edinburgh in 1726. He studied medicine but never really practised it, made money from a chemical business, and then ran a farm in the Borders, where for years he watched the rain wash soil off his fields and into the streams. Soil goes down to the sea, he reasoned. On the seabed it hardens into layers of rock. Heat inside the earth lifts those layers up again as new land, and rain and frost slowly wear them down. And the cycle repeats... over and over.

If that was true, the earth had to be unimaginably old, far older than the six thousand years many of his contemporaries took from a literal reading of the Bible. In 1785 Hutton presented his theory to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1788 he wrote the line that still gives geologists goosebumps: no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.

That same year he took two friends by boat to a rocky headland on the Berwickshire coast called Siccar Point. There he showed them grey layers of rock standing on end, worn flat and then covered by red sandstone lying calmly on top. Each set of layers meant a whole cycle of sea, rock, uplift and erosion. One of those friends, the mathematician John Playfair, later wrote that the mind seemed to grow giddy looking so far into the abyss of time.

Hutton was a sociable man who dined every week with Adam Smith and the chemist Joseph Black, but his own writing was famously hard going, and his ideas spread mainly through Playfair's clearer book. Today he is often called the father of modern geology, and his evidence is right behind this building. Walk south along Queen's Drive and take the path that climbs onto Salisbury Crags. It is the first real ascent, so pace yourself.
3. Salisbury Crags & the Radical Road

Salisbury Crags, Queen's Drive, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh EH8, UK

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.
4. Hutton's Section: The Rock That Proved the Earth Is Old

Hutton's Section, Queen's Drive, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh EH8, UK

Near the southern end of the crags, just above the road, look for a patch of cliff marked by an information board. It does not look like much: a band of dark rock sitting on top of paler, layered stone. But geologists come here from all over the world as if on pilgrimage. This is Hutton's Section. Depending on the fencing along the Radical Road, you may have to admire it from a short distance.

In Hutton's day, most experts followed the Neptunists, who believed that all rocks had settled out of a vast primeval ocean, layer after layer, like sediment in a glass of muddy water. If they were right, the dark dolerite on top should simply be one more layer laid down on the one beneath. Hutton had a different idea. He thought this rock had come from below, as a hot liquid, pushed into the layers from underneath.

And here was his evidence. Look closely at the boundary. In places the dark rock cuts across the layers below it, and it has broken off chunks of the sediment and swallowed them whole. The sedimentary rock right at the contact looks baked and altered, as if it had been in an oven. Mud settling gently on a seabed does not do that. Molten rock forcing its way in does. The history of the earth was written, quite literally, at the bottom of this cliff.

It sounds obvious now, but the battle between the Neptunists and Hutton's followers, the Plutonists, named after the god of the underworld, raged for decades and split the lecture halls of Edinburgh. Hutton's side won. The idea that the earth is shaped by heat, uplift and slow erosion over immense stretches of time became a foundation of modern geology, and it was carried forward by Charles Lyell, whose books the young Charles Darwin took with him on the Beagle.

One small request: please do not hammer or chip the rocks. This is a protected site, and every geology class that comes after you wants to see it too. Now cross into the valley to the east and follow the path that runs north along the floor of Hunter's Bog, with the crags on your left and the bulk of Arthur's Seat on your right.
5. Hunter's Bog: The Hidden Valley of the Royal Hunt

Hunter's Bog, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh EH8, UK

Stop in the middle of Hunter's Bog and listen. The noise of the city has almost disappeared. You are in a hidden valley, walled in by the back of Salisbury Crags on one side and the steep slopes of Arthur's Seat on the other, and on a quiet morning you may hear nothing but birdsong and the wind moving through the grass.

The name recalls the centuries when all of this was a royal hunting ground, and the most famous hunting story of all is a legend. In the twelfth century, the story goes, King David the First went hunting here on a holy day, against the advice of his confessor. A huge stag charged and threw him from his horse, and as its antlers came down on him, a glowing cross appeared between them. The stag fled. In thanks, the king founded an abbey at the foot of the hill and called it Holyrood, the Holy Cross.

The valley itself is a sculpture made by ice. During the last ice age, glaciers pushed across this land from the west, and they scraped out the softer rocks along this line more deeply than the hard dolerite and lava around them. When the ice melted, it left this hollow behind, badly drained and boggy at the bottom. Look at the western face of Arthur's Seat above you: the ice made it steep, while the sheltered eastern side slopes gently away.

Look up, too, at the long scar of scree slashing down the slope to your right. Locals gave it a wonderful Scots name, the Guttit Haddie, the gutted haddock, because that is exactly what its shape resembles. It is said to have been torn open by a cloudburst in the eighteenth century, when a single storm sent a torrent down the hillside.

The whole park is protected for its rocks and its wildlife, and its grassland and crags hold rare plants, among them the sticky catchfly, a small pink flower of sunny rocky slopes. Please keep to the paths. Now walk on to the northern end of the valley, past the dry hollow called the Dry Dam, and go down towards the water you can see glinting below: St Margaret's Loch.
6. St Margaret's Loch: Prince Albert's Lake

St Margaret's Loch, Queen's Drive, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh EH8, UK

Walk down to the edge of St Margaret's Loch and you will probably be met by a crowd of swans, geese and ducks who assume you have brought them lunch. Please do not feed them bread... it is bad for the birds and for the water. Above the loch, on a rocky knoll, stand the broken walls of a medieval chapel, the most romantic ruin in the park.

The loch looks ancient, but it is younger than the railway. It was created in 1856, when a marshy patch at the foot of the hill was dug out and flooded. It was part of a programme of improvements to the park encouraged by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, who had firm ideas about how a royal park ought to look. Dunsapie Loch, higher up the hill, was made in the same spirit a few years earlier.

The same improvements gave the park the road you keep crossing, Queen's Drive, which loops right around the hills so that carriages could enjoy the views. Victorian Edinburgh came out here on Sundays in its best clothes, and the park became a stage for enormous gatherings too. In 1860 Queen Victoria reviewed more than twenty thousand volunteer soldiers here, with vast crowds watching from the slopes.

The loch is named after Saint Margaret, the English-born queen of Malcolm the Third, who died at Edinburgh Castle in 1093. Her name is on another curiosity nearby: at the foot of the crags, beside the road, a small medieval well house called St Margaret's Well. It was moved here in the nineteenth century, stone by stone, from its original site at Restalrig, when railway works threatened it.

Wildlife has made itself very much at home in this artificial loch. Herons stand in the reeds like grey statues, and in winter extra visitors fly in from colder places. Now take the path that climbs the knoll above the water to the ruined chapel. It is short, but steep.
7. St Anthony's Chapel: A Ruin Above the Firth

St Anthony's Chapel, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh EH8, UK

Climb up to the ruined walls of St Anthony's Chapel and turn around. The loch lies below you, the palace and the Parliament off to the west, and beyond the rooftops stretches the wide grey band of the Firth of Forth, with the hills of Fife on the far side. Only fragments of the chapel still stand, with an empty window frame looking out towards the sea.

Nobody is quite sure who built it, or exactly when. Most historians place it in the fifteenth century, and some link it to the Order of St Anthony, a religious order that cared for victims of a terrible illness known as St Anthony's fire, and which had a hospital at Leith. Down the slope, a small spring was known as St Anthony's Well.

Why build a chapel up here, on a bare and windy knoll? One appealing theory says that a light burning in its window could be seen by ships in the Forth, a beacon and a blessing for sailors coming home to Leith. It is a lovely idea, and from this spot you can certainly see the water... but there is no firm proof.

The ruin became a favourite of the Romantics. An old Scottish ballad, Waly Waly, has a broken-hearted woman singing that Arthur's Seat shall be her bed, and Saint Anton's well her drink, now that her true love has forsaken her. Walter Scott sent his heroine Jeanie Deans, in The Heart of Midlothian, to these lonely slopes at night for a frightening meeting. For two centuries painters drew this broken gable against the sky.

From here the serious climbing begins. Follow the path that heads south-east, up the long grassy ridge of Whinny Hill. It is steady uphill work, so take breaks, and turn around often to enjoy the view opening up behind you.
8. Whinny Hill: Lava Ridge and the Fairy Coffins

Whinny Hill, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh EH8, UK

Pause on the broad back of Whinny Hill and look at the ground under your boots. Thin soil, outcrops of dark rock, and everywhere clumps of spiky gorse, which in Scots is called whin... hence the name. In spring the gorse blazes yellow, and on a warm day it smells faintly of coconut.

The ridge you are walking on is made of lava. Around 350 million years ago, when this part of the world lay close to the equator, the volcano here erupted again and again. Thick flows of lava spread across the land and cooled one on top of another, and you can sometimes make out the steps between them as low terraces running along the hillside. You are climbing the stacked pages of an eruption diary.

Somewhere on these north-eastern slopes, in 1836, a group of boys hunting rabbits found a small opening hidden behind slabs of rock. Inside were seventeen tiny wooden coffins, each about the length of a finger, each holding a carved wooden figure dressed in cloth. Nobody has ever explained them. Witchcraft, sailors' charms, a secret memorial to the victims of Burke and Hare... every theory has its fans. Eight of the coffins survive, and you can see them in the National Museum of Scotland.

The volcano that built these hills had several vents, and the summit ahead of you sits on the main one, choked with shattered rock and solidified lava. Since then, hundreds of millions of years of erosion have cut the old volcano down to its roots, and the glaciers finished the sculpture. What remains is less a mountain than an X-ray of one.

The final slope to the summit is the steepest part of the walk, with bare rock polished smooth by countless boots. In wet or windy weather it can be treacherous, so watch your footing, use your hands where you need to, and keep children close. Up you go.
9. Arthur's Seat Summit: On Top of the Volcano

Arthur's Seat, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh EH8, UK

You made it. Stand beside the stone pillar on the summit of Arthur's Seat, 251 metres above the sea, and turn slowly in a full circle. The castle on its rock, the spires of the Old Town, the long grey Firth of Forth with its bridges, the hills of Fife, the Pentland Hills to the south... and on a clear day, hills far away to the north-west.

Who was Arthur? Nobody knows for certain. Some link the name to the legendary King Arthur, as with many places in the north of Britain. Others think it is a garbled version of an older Gaelic name. The mystery suits the place. Mary Shelley mentions it among the sights of Edinburgh in Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson called it a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design.

Every first of May, before dawn, people climb up here to wash their faces in the morning dew, following an old belief that May dew brings beauty for the year ahead. The custom is centuries old, and Edinburgh's young women once made the climb in crowds. Today they are joined by runners, singers and anyone who simply wants to watch the sun come up out of the sea.

Under your feet is the plug of the old volcano. Around 350 million years ago this was its main vent, spitting ash and lava over a landscape of swamps and shallow seas. The volcano fell silent, was buried, was lifted up again and was carved down by ice, until only its hard core stood above the plain. Edinburgh is a city built on volcanoes: the castle rock and Calton Hill are remnants of the same ancient fires.

The summit is exposed, and the wind can be fierce even on a sunny day, so do not linger too close to the edges. Take your photographs, then descend eastwards on the gentler slope, following the path down towards the road and the little loch below Dunsapie Crag.
10. Dunsapie Loch & the Iron Age Hill Fort

Dunsapie Loch, Queen's Drive, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh EH8, UK

Down at Dunsapie Loch the hill suddenly feels gentle again. A small sheet of water mirrors the sky, geese graze on its banks, and above it rises the rocky knoll of Dunsapie Crag. Look back at Arthur's Seat: from this side, after everything it put you through, it looks almost tame.

Like St Margaret's, this loch is man-made. It was formed in 1844, during the same Victorian improvements that brought Queen's Drive, by damming a small hollow in the hill. But the crag above it is far older in human terms. On its summit are the remains of ramparts of a prehistoric hill fort, one of several forts that once crowned the hills of the park.

Who lived up there? Most likely people of the Iron Age, some two thousand years ago, though the forts of the park have never been fully excavated and their dates remain uncertain. From the top they could watch the coast and the low ground to the east, and see anyone approaching long before they arrived. The name Dunsapie probably begins with dun, an old Celtic word for a fort.

Look along the slopes around you, especially when the sun is low, and you may make out long ridges and terraces running across the hillside like lines on a ploughed field. They are ancient cultivation terraces. Some may be prehistoric, others medieval, and archaeologists still argue about them. Either way, they prove that people once grew crops on these windy slopes, long before this was a playground for walkers, runners and wedding photographers.

From here the walk heads down to the village of Duddingston. Follow Queen's Drive south a little way, then take the path that drops down the slope towards the big loch you can see below. It is downhill all the way, but steep in places, so go easy on your knees.
11. Duddingston Loch & Samson's Ribs

Duddingston Loch, Queen's Drive, Edinburgh EH15, UK

From the slope above Duddingston Loch, look down on the largest stretch of water in the park, fringed with thick reed beds and willows. This is the only natural loch in Holyrood Park, a survivor of the lakes and marshes left behind by the melting ice. It has been a bird sanctuary since the 1920s, so keep your voice low.

Now look west along the hillside above the water and you will see a cliff that looks like a row of giant organ pipes. These are Samson's Ribs. They are columns of volcanic rock that formed when a thick mass of molten rock cooled slowly and cracked into many-sided pillars, the same process that made the Giant's Causeway in Ireland. Someone long ago thought they looked like the rib cage of the biblical strongman, and the name stuck.

In hard winters, when the loch froze solid, it became one of the great playgrounds of Scotland. Edinburgh skaters formed one of the earliest skating clubs in the world here in the eighteenth century, and curlers swept their stones across the ice. Perhaps the best-loved painting in Scotland shows a minister, the Reverend Robert Walker, gliding across this loch with his arms folded. It is known as the Skating Minister, usually attributed to Henry Raeburn, though some scholars have argued for a French artist instead.

The loch has also given up treasure. In 1778, men dredging it pulled out a hoard of Bronze Age weapons, swords and spearheads, perhaps placed in the water as an offering some three thousand years ago. To ancient people, lakes like this one may have been doorways to another world.

Today the reed beds shelter herons, grebes and, in winter, flocks of ducks from the north. Now follow the path down to the road and along the edge of the village to the old church on its little hill above the water. The walk ends there... conveniently close to a pub.
12. Duddingston Kirk & the Sheep Heid Inn

Duddingston Kirk, Old Church Lane, Edinburgh EH15 3PX, UK

Climb the few steps to the gate of Duddingston Kirk and look for two curious objects. One is an iron collar on a chain, fixed to the wall: the jougs, in which wrongdoers were once locked by the neck for public shame. The other is a block of stone with steps, the loupin-on stane, which helped riders climb onto their horses. Between punishment and practicality, here is the old Scottish parish in a nutshell.

The church is one of the oldest in Edinburgh still in use, begun in the twelfth century, and on its south side you can still find a round-arched Norman doorway with carved stones. By the gate stands a small tower built in the 1820s for a grim purpose: to guard the graves from body snatchers, who dug up fresh corpses and sold them to the anatomy schools of the city.

In the early nineteenth century the minister here was John Thomson, who was also one of the finest landscape painters in Scotland. He painted in a little tower down by the loch, and the story goes that he named it Edinburgh, so that unwelcome callers could be told, quite truthfully, that the minister had gone to Edinburgh. Walter Scott was among his friends.

Just along the narrow street called The Causeway stands the Sheep Heid Inn. It claims to be one of the oldest pubs in Scotland, with roots reaching back to the fourteenth century, and it keeps an old skittle alley. Legend says King James the Sixth gave the inn a snuff box made from a ram's head, which gave it its name. And in September 1745 Bonnie Prince Charlie's Highland army camped beside this village before marching out to win the Battle of Prestonpans.

Think about the day you have had. You started at a parliament that opened in 2004, climbed through a volcano 350 million years old, and stood where James Hutton realised that the earth has no vestige of a beginning. This is where the walk ends. Sit down somewhere warm and let your legs recover... the city centre is about half an hour's walk back through the park.