Calton Hill, Edinburgh: Monuments, Martyrs and the Athens of the North

From Robert Adam's Register House and David Hume's tomb up to the unfinished National Monument, Nelson's time ball and the most famous view in Edinburgh, then round Playfair's terraces to the parliament that never sat

Edinburgh · 12 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. North Bridge: The First View of Calton Hill

   North Bridge, Edinburgh EH1 1QN, UK

   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.

2. 2. General Register House & the Wellington Statue

   2 Princes Street, Edinburgh EH1 3YY, UK

   In front of the long, domed building at the east end of Princes Street, a bronze Duke of Wellington sits on a horse that rears up on its hind legs, frozen in mid-air. Balancing tons of metal on two slim legs was a real engineering feat in the 1850s, and the sculptor spent years solving it.

   Edinburgh's favourite joke about it is a pun: the statue shows the Iron Duke, in bronze, by Steell. The sculptor was indeed John Steell, and the statue was unveiled in 1852, on the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. The Duke himself was still alive that summer... he died a few months later, in September.

   Behind him stands General Register House, designed by Robert Adam, with its foundation stone laid in 1774. For centuries Scotland's legal and state records had been kept in cramped, damp rooms in the Old Town, and over the centuries many had been lost to fire, war and neglect. Part of the money for this new building came, rather pointedly, from the estates confiscated from Jacobite families after the rising of 1745. The rebels' land paid for the archive of the state that had defeated them.

   Inside, Adam built a great domed rotunda lined with galleries of shelves, and the building is still doing the job it was designed for. It is one of the oldest purpose-built record offices in the world still in use, part of the National Records of Scotland, which keep among their treasures the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, the famous letter in which Scotland's barons asserted the kingdom's independence.

   Look at the clock tower of the grand hotel opposite: for generations it has been set a few minutes fast, so that travellers do not miss their trains. Now walk east along Waterloo Place, the broad street beside Register House, and keep going until you see a gateway and a tall obelisk on your right.

3. 3. Old Calton Burial Ground: Hume, Lincoln and the Martyrs

   Waterloo Place, Edinburgh EH1 3BQ, UK

   As you walked along Waterloo Place you may not have noticed that you were crossing a bridge. Regent Bridge, finished in 1819, carries the street high over Calton Road below. Now go through the gate on the right into Old Calton Burial Ground, and the noise of the traffic drops away behind the walls.

   When Waterloo Place was cut through here in the 1810s, the new road sliced the old graveyard in two. Graves had to be dug up and the dead moved, so a new burial ground was opened further east. Edinburgh has always been short of flat land, for the living and the dead alike.

   The round, castle-like tomb near the wall belongs to David Hume, the philosopher and historian, designed by his friend Robert Adam. Hume was the great sceptic of the Enlightenment, doubtful about miracles and polite but firm about religion, and when he died in 1776 many pious citizens were sure he was damned. The story goes that his friends feared a mob might attack the grave, and for several nights men kept watch over it by lantern light.

   Nearby stands someone you might not expect in Scotland: Abraham Lincoln, with a freed slave at his feet. This is the Scottish-American Soldiers Monument of 1893, honouring Scots who fought for the Union in the American Civil War, and it is often called the first statue of an American president outside the United States. And the tall obelisk is the Political Martyrs' Monument of 1844, for Thomas Muir and four other reformers who, in 1793 and 1794, were sentenced to transportation to Australia simply for campaigning for the vote.

   Muir's story alone would fill a film: he escaped from the penal colony on an American ship, crossed the Pacific, was wounded in a sea battle off Spain and died in exile in France. Now return to Waterloo Place, and take the steps up onto Calton Hill. It is a short, steep climb, so go slowly, and stop at the little round temple at the top.

4. 4. Dugald Stewart Monument & the City Observatory

   Calton Hill, Edinburgh EH7 5AA, UK

   Catch your breath beside the little round temple on the edge of the hill, and then turn around. There it is: Princes Street running away into the distance, the spire of the Scott Monument, the clock tower of the hotel on the corner, the Old Town piled up along its ridge and the Castle at the far end. It is probably the most photographed view in Edinburgh, and from here you can pick out North Bridge, where you started.

   The temple is the Dugald Stewart Monument, designed in 1831 by William Henry Playfair. It is a version of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, a tiny ancient monument to a winning theatre production. Edinburgh liked that model so much that you will see another version of it on this walk.

   Dugald Stewart was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and his lectures were the place to be in the years around 1800. Students came from all over Britain and from America to hear him. A future prime minister, Lord Palmerston, studied here under him and lived in his house. Stewart did not invent a single famous theory, but he taught a whole generation how to think, which is perhaps a better monument.

   Now look behind you at the walled enclosure with its domes. That is the City Observatory, built by Playfair in 1818. The small Gothic tower in its corner is older still, and it was designed by James Craig, the same young man who drew the plan of the New Town. The professional astronomers moved out in the 1890s, because the smoke of Auld Reekie, as Edinburgh was nicknamed, made the sky too murky, though amateur stargazers kept using the domes for another century. Today the site is an art centre called Collective.

   Play a little game with the hilltop: how many temples can you see from where you stand? Now walk across the open summit toward the row of giant columns standing on the north-east side of the hill.

5. 5. The National Monument: Edinburgh's Disgrace

   Calton Hill, Edinburgh EH7 5AA, UK

   Walk up onto the stepped stone base and stand between the columns. Twelve enormous Doric pillars rise in a row, carrying a heavy beam, and behind them... nothing at all. Just sky, grass and the wind coming off the Firth of Forth.

   This was meant to be Scotland's National Monument to the soldiers and sailors who died in the wars against Napoleon. And it was meant to be nothing less than a full-sized copy of the Parthenon in Athens, with a church or hall of honour inside. The foundation stone was laid in 1822, during King George the Fourth's famous visit to Edinburgh, and the design was by Charles Robert Cockerell and William Henry Playfair.

   Then reality arrived. Work began in 1826, the public subscription brought in only a fraction of what was needed, and in 1829 the money ran out completely. Twelve columns stood, and that was where it stopped. Edinburgh, never kind to itself, promptly nicknamed it Scotland's Disgrace, or Edinburgh's Folly. The stones were cut from Craigleith quarry on the edge of the city, and some of the blocks were so heavy that it took teams of horses and dozens of men to drag each one up the hill.

   And yet, almost two centuries later, the city loves it. Several proposals to finish it have come and gone, and each time people preferred the ruin. Unfinished, it looks more like a real Greek temple than a completed copy ever would, and it fits perfectly with the idea of Edinburgh as the Athens of the North.

   Every year on the night of the 30th of April, the hill fills with drums, fire and painted dancers for the Beltane Fire Festival, a revival of the old Celtic feast of the start of summer, held here since 1988. Then the columns glow orange in the dark. Now walk south across the summit to the tall, narrow tower that looks like a telescope standing on its end.

6. 6. Nelson Monument & the Time Ball

   32 Calton Hill, Edinburgh EH7 5AA, UK

   Stand at the foot of the tall, narrow tower on the hill's highest point and follow it up with your eyes. It narrows in stages like a telescope set down on its eyepiece, and right at the top, on a mast, hangs a large ball.

   This is the Nelson Monument, built between 1807 and 1815, after Admiral Horatio Nelson was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Its shape is no coincidence: the navy was everything to a port city like Edinburgh and Leith, and the telescope was the sailor's tool. Around its base crouches a little castellated building, as if the tower had brought its own fort.

   The ball on top is a time ball, installed in 1852, and it still works. Every day the ball is raised up the mast, and at exactly one o'clock it drops. Ships' captains in the harbour at Leith, two miles away, watched it through their own telescopes to set their chronometers, because an accurate clock on board was the only way to work out your longitude at sea. From 1861 the One O'Clock Gun at the Castle fired at the same moment, for days when fog hid the ball. Sound travels slowly, though, and the gun was heard in Leith several seconds late, so special maps were printed showing how many seconds to allow, street by street.

   Every year on the 21st of October, the anniversary of Trafalgar, flags are run up the mast to spell out Nelson's famous signal: England expects that every man will do his duty. On a Scottish hill, flown in honour of a fleet with a great many Scots in it, the wording raises an eyebrow or two.

   The monument reminds you that this city's monuments to peace and philosophy stand side by side with monuments to war and empire, on the same patch of grass. Now head down the north side of the hill toward the church tower below. The path is steep and can be slippery, so take your time on the way down.

7. 7. Greenside: The Hollow Under the Hill

   Greenside Parish Church, Royal Terrace, Edinburgh EH7 5AB, UK

   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.

8. 8. Royal Terrace: Playfair's Whisky Row

   Royal Terrace, Edinburgh EH7 5AB, UK

   Royal Terrace runs on and on beside you, one of the longest Georgian frontages in Edinburgh, with columned centrepieces breaking the rhythm every so often like a drumbeat. On your right the gardens climb toward the hill, and on your left the city falls away to the north.

   This is part of what is called the Calton scheme, or the Eastern New Town. Around 1819 William Henry Playfair, the same architect whose temples you saw on the summit, drew a plan to wrap the whole hill in terraces. Instead of a grid, the streets follow the contours of the slope, like rings around a tree, with gardens in between. Building began in the early 1820s, but it went slowly, and the eastern end of this terrace was not completed for decades.

   Royal Terrace earned a nickname: Whisky Row. Many of the houses were bought by prosperous wine and spirit merchants, and the story goes that they chose the upper floors here so they could watch their ships coming up the Firth of Forth into Leith, and know before anyone else that the cargo had arrived. Whether every merchant really stood at the window with a spyglass, nobody knows, but it is a very Edinburgh kind of legend.

   Look at the scale of it. On the flat land Craig built a disciplined grid; on the hill, Playfair built something closer to a stage set, with long, continuous façades that you are meant to see from far off, from the north of the city and even from the sea. Between this terrace and the next one lies a large private garden, laid out on the slope of the hill itself, open only to keyholders.

   The plan was never fully built, and some of the land around the eastern side was left open. That is part of why Calton Hill still feels wild in the middle of a capital city. At the eastern end of Royal Terrace, follow the curve of the road south as it bends around the hill into Regent Terrace.

9. 9. Regent Terrace: The Balcony Over Holyrood

   Regent Terrace, Edinburgh EH7 5BS, UK

   On Regent Terrace every house looks the same way: south, over a long drop. Step to the railings opposite the doors and the whole valley opens below you: the roofs of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the ruined abbey, the modern Parliament, and behind them the great lion-shaped bulk of Arthur's Seat and the cliff of Salisbury Crags.

   Playfair designed this terrace in the 1820s, the southern ring of his scheme around the hill. Notice the long run of cast-iron balconies on the first floor. They were not decoration: in a Georgian house the drawing room was on the first floor, and the balcony turned it into a theatre box facing one of the most dramatic views in Europe.

   One of these houses flies a foreign flag. Number 3 is the Consulate General of the United States, which has looked out over this view for many years. So on a hill that already has a statue of Abraham Lincoln in its graveyard, America keeps a front-row seat.

   Look down into that valley and think about what this walk has been. Down there, in Holyrood, is the old seat of Scottish kings, where Mary Queen of Scots saw her secretary murdered, and the new seat of Scottish democracy, opened in 2004. Up here on the hill are the monuments to ideas: philosophers, a poet, an argument about who should be allowed to vote. Edinburgh likes to keep its power in the valley and its conscience on the hill, and they have been looking at each other ever since.

   Arthur's Seat, by the way, is the remains of an ancient volcano, and the rocks of Calton Hill belong to the same volcanic past. You are standing, quite literally, on a fragment of a long-dead fire. Now walk west along Regent Terrace, back toward Regent Road, until a round Greek temple appears on the slope to your left.

10. 10. Burns Monument & New Calton Burial Ground

    Regent Road, Edinburgh EH7 5BL, UK

    Here is the second round temple of the walk, perched on the slope beside Regent Road, with a ring of columns and a crown of carved stone on top. This one belongs to a poet: Robert Burns.

    It was designed by Thomas Hamilton and built in the early 1830s, once again inspired by the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, the same model as the Dugald Stewart Monument up the hill. Inside, it originally sheltered a marble statue of Burns by the sculptor John Flaxman, but the damp did it no favours, and the statue was moved indoors long ago.

    Burns himself arrived in Edinburgh in 1786, a farmer from Ayrshire who had just published a slim book of poems in Kilmarnock. The capital's salons went wild for him. Society hostesses passed him around, a new Edinburgh edition of his poems came out in 1787, and among the young people who met him was a fifteen-year-old boy called Walter Scott, who never forgot it.

    Now look over the wall, down the slope below the road. That terraced cemetery is New Calton Burial Ground, opened around 1820 for the graves displaced by Waterloo Place. Near its top stands a small round watchtower. It was built to protect the newly buried from the resurrection men, the body-snatchers who dug up fresh corpses to sell to the city's anatomy schools. Families paid watchers to sit there through the night, until the Anatomy Act of 1832 finally gave the medical schools a legal supply. The lighthouse-building Stevensons have family graves down there too.

    So on this one bend of the road you have the man Edinburgh adored and the dead it could not protect. The city of the Enlightenment had a very practical underside. Walk west along Regent Road toward the great columned building that looks like a Greek temple lying on its side along the hill.

11. 11. The Old Royal High School: The Parliament That Waited

    5-7 Regent Road, Edinburgh EH7 5BL, UK

    Stand on Regent Road and take in the whole length of this building: a central temple front of Doric columns, long colonnaded wings and terraces stepping along the hillside. Of all the Greek dreams on Calton Hill, this is the one that was actually finished, and it is magnificent.

    It was built between 1826 and 1829 for the Royal High School, one of the oldest schools in Scotland, which traces its roots back to the twelfth century. The architect, Thomas Hamilton, modelled the central block on the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens. Among the boys who later climbed these steps was Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, born just across town by Charlotte Square.

    In 1968 the school moved out to the suburbs, and the building was chosen for a very different job. In the 1970s its great hall was turned into a debating chamber for a planned Scottish Assembly. In the referendum of 1979, a small majority of those who voted said yes, but the law required at least forty per cent of the whole electorate to approve, and that threshold was not reached. The chamber stood ready, and empty.

    From 1992 to 1997, on the pavement across the road, campaigners kept up a round-the-clock vigil for a Scottish Parliament, in a makeshift shelter, day and night, for more than five years. In 1997 a second referendum produced a clear yes. Many expected the new Parliament to sit right here. Instead, it was built down in the valley at Holyrood, the building you saw from Regent Terrace, which opened in 2004.

    Since then the old school has waited, while the city argued for years about what it should become. Few buildings have stood so long so close to history without quite stepping into it. Continue west along Regent Road toward the tall, sharp-edged building facing you, just before the road reaches Waterloo Place again.

12. 12. St Andrew's House: From Calton Jail to Government

    2 Regent Road, Edinburgh EH1 3DG, UK

    Face the long, pale building with its tall vertical bays and stern symmetry, so different from the Greek temples around it. This is St Andrew's House, Edinburgh's great piece of 1930s architecture, sharp-edged and unmistakably modern.

    Before it stood here, this rock belonged to Calton Jail. The prison opened in 1817, with castellated walls and towers along the cliff edge, so that travellers arriving in Edinburgh from the east were greeted by a fortress full of prisoners. Some called it romantic. It was not. Look along to the small turreted building near the burial ground: that is the Governor's House, the one fragment of the jail that survived when the rest was demolished in the 1930s.

    St Andrew's House was designed by Thomas Tait and completed on the eve of the Second World War, to bring the civil servants of the Scottish Office together under one roof. Look at the large figures standing along the façade above the entrance. They represent the things a government is supposed to look after, such as health, agriculture and education. Today the building is the headquarters of the Scottish Government.

    Think about the journey you have made. A bridge that collapsed and was built again. An archive paid for with rebels' land. A sceptic's tomb guarded through the night, a president among Scottish graves, reformers sent to the far side of the world for asking for the vote. An unfinished temple, a time ball, a play performed in a hollow, terraces for whisky merchants, a poet's temple, a parliament that waited... and finally a jail turned into the offices of a government.

    That is Calton Hill: a small green hill where Edinburgh has argued, in stone, about war, faith, freedom and power for more than two hundred years. Waterloo Place and Princes Street are just a few steps to the west. Before you go, look back up at the columns on the summit one last time.