Crowns, Kirks and Sanctuary: Edinburgh's Canongate and the Palace of Holyroodhouse

Down the lower Royal Mile from a lost queen's church to the palace where Rizzio died: a royal burgh of its own, a ruined abbey of kings, a park where debtors hid from the law, and back up to the gate where the world ended

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

1. 1. Trinity Apse: The Church That Moved House

   Chalmers Close, off Jeffrey Street, Edinburgh EH1, UK

   Find the small, dark Gothic chapel end squeezed into Chalmers Close, with its tall pointed windows and stubby buttresses, looking oddly out of place among the tenements, as if somebody had dropped it here from somewhere else. That is more or less what happened. This fragment, the Trinity Apse, is a church that moved house.

   In 1460 King James II of Scotland was killed at the siege of Roxburgh, when one of his own cannons burst beside him. His widow, Mary of Guelders, a duke's daughter from the Low Countries, suddenly became one of the most powerful people in the kingdom. That same year she founded a great collegiate church, Trinity College Kirk, in the valley below the Old Town, and three years later she was buried in it.

   For that church its provost, Edward Bonkil, commissioned one of the treasures of Scottish art: the Trinity Altarpiece, painted in Flanders by Hugo van der Goes in the 1470s, with King James III and his queen, Margaret of Denmark, kneeling on its wings. Against all odds it survived the Reformation, and today it hangs in the Scottish National Gallery on the Mound, lent from the Royal Collection.

   Then came the railway. In 1848 the North British Railway needed the valley for what became Waverley Station, and a medieval church stood in the way. Its stones were numbered and stacked on the slopes of Calton Hill, waiting to be rebuilt. Years passed, and stones went missing. When a new Trinity College Church finally went up here in the 1870s, only the old apse was reassembled as part of it, and later even that Victorian church was pulled down, leaving this lonely piece behind.

   And the queen? When the old church was dug up, bones believed to be hers were lifted and carried down to the royal vault of Holyrood Abbey, which is exactly where this walk is heading. Whether they really were Mary of Guelders, nobody can prove. Walk back to the High Street and turn left, downhill, past the World's End pub, where we will finish. Carry on into the Canongate until you reach a church with a curly Dutch gable on your left.

2. 2. Canongate Kirk: The King's Parish and Adam Smith's Grave

   153 Canongate, Edinburgh EH8 8BN, UK

   Stand in front of the curving, Dutch-style gable of Canongate Kirk and find the very top: a pair of stag's antlers with a cross rising between them. Down on the pavement, a young man in bronze strides past you, coat flapping, book in hand. He is the poet Robert Fergusson, and those antlers belong to the oldest royal legend in Edinburgh.

   This church exists because of a king's religion. In 1687 the Catholic King James VII took over the nave of Holyrood Abbey, which had been the Canongate's own parish church, and turned it into a Chapel Royal for his revived Order of the Thistle. The parishioners were thrown out. Money left decades earlier by a merchant called Thomas Moodie paid for this new kirk, finished around 1691. By then James had already fled and lost his throne.

   It is still the parish church of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and members of the royal family worship here when they are in residence. In 2011 Zara Phillips, granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II, married the rugby player Mike Tindall in this church. On the gable, a carved royal coat of arms reminds everyone whose kirk this is.

   Now slip into the kirkyard. Near its western side lies Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, who died in 1790 in a house a few steps away. And by the path is Fergusson's own grave, with a headstone paid for by Robert Burns in 1787. Burns worshipped him. Fergusson wrote brilliant poems in Scots about this very city and died in its asylum in 1774, at just twenty-four. Burns called him, in verse, by far my elder brother in the Muse.

   Agnes Maclehose, the Clarinda of Burns's passionate letters, is buried here too, so the kirkyard is a kind of Enlightenment address book: economists, poets and lovers within a few metres of each other. The bronze Fergusson outside, by the sculptor David Annand, was only added in 2004. Leave by the gate, turn left down the Canongate, and slip into the narrow opening of Dunbar's Close on the same side of the street.

3. 3. Dunbar's Close Garden & Panmure House

   Dunbar's Close, Canongate, Edinburgh EH8, UK

   Walk through the dark passage and suddenly the noise of the Canongate falls away. In front of you lies a small formal garden of clipped box hedges, gravel paths, herbs and young trees, laid out the way a seventeenth-century Edinburgh merchant would have known it. Behind you rise the backs of the old tenements, and ahead the green cliff of Calton Hill.

   The garden is younger than it looks. It was created in the 1970s and handed to the city in 1978, an attempt to recall the long, narrow back gardens that once ran behind every house in the Canongate, when this was a separate burgh belonging to the abbey and a fashionable suburb for courtiers serving the palace. The story goes that Cromwell's soldiers camped in this close after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, though the name may simply come from a past owner.

   Now find Panmure House, the sturdy harled house with crow-stepped gables just beyond, off Lochend Close. It was built in the late seventeenth century, and from 1778 until his death in 1790 its tenant was Adam Smith. By then he was famous across Europe, and he worked here as a Commissioner of Customs, collecting the kind of duties his own book had criticised. On Sunday evenings he held suppers for friends, and the talk was some of the best in Britain.

   Before he died, Smith asked his executors, the chemist Joseph Black and the geologist James Hutton, to burn his unfinished manuscripts. They did, sixteen volumes of them, in this house. What we lost, nobody will ever know. The house decayed through the industrial nineteenth century and was restored only in recent years as a place for debating economics.

   No king ever lived in this garden, yet it explains the Canongate. Nobles built here to be near the royal palace, and when James VI left for London in 1603, taking his court with him, the street slowly slid from fashion into breweries, tanneries and crowded tenements. Return to the Canongate, turn left and keep walking downhill to an archway on your left near the very bottom, the entrance to White Horse Close.

4. 4. White Horse Close: The Coaching Inn by the Palace

   White Horse Close, Canongate, Edinburgh EH8, UK

   Pass under the archway and step into one of the prettiest corners of Edinburgh: a little courtyard of white-harled houses with red roofs, outside stairs, gables and dormer windows, closed at the far end by a building with a double flight of steps. It looks like a stage set for a costume drama, and in a way it is a beautifully restored one.

   In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this was a coaching inn, the White Horse, at the very bottom of the Royal Mile. Travellers set off from here by stagecoach for London, a journey that in the early days could take well over a week of bumping along muddy roads. Legend says the inn took its name from a white palfrey belonging to Mary Queen of Scots, stabled here beside the palace. It is a lovely story, and there is no evidence for it at all.

   In 1745, when Prince Charles Edward Stuart held court at Holyrood, tradition says officers of his Jacobite army lodged at the inn. Picture them in this courtyard, plaids over their shoulders, a stone's throw from the palace where their prince was dancing, believing for a few autumn weeks that the Stuart crown was coming home.

   By the nineteenth century the White Horse had sunk into slum housing, like much of the Canongate, with whole families living in single rooms. Towards the end of that century it was reconstructed as homes for working people, and in the 1960s it was restored again, which is why it looks so crisp today. What you see is partly old fabric and partly a Victorian and modern dream of the Old Town. Edinburgh has always been good at that.

   As you leave, look down at the roadway where the Canongate turns into Abbey Strand. Set into the cobbles are brass letters S. They mark the edge of the old abbey sanctuary, and you will hear more about them soon. Now walk the last few steps to the tall iron gates of the Palace of Holyroodhouse and look through into the forecourt with its fountain.

5. 5. Palace of Holyroodhouse: Mary, Darnley and Rizzio

   Canongate, Edinburgh EH8 8DX, UK

   Through the iron gates you see it: a long grey palace with a turreted tower at each end, a carved entrance in the middle, and in the forecourt a fountain bristling with Gothic pinnacles and little figures. Behind it rises the green bulk of Arthur's Seat. This is the King's official residence in Scotland, and few royal homes anywhere have seen so much blood in so small a space.

   It began as the guest house of the abbey next door. Around 1500 James IV built a proper palace here for his English bride, Margaret Tudor, and his son James V added the great tower on the left around 1530. Most of what you see today was rebuilt for Charles II in the 1670s by the architect Sir William Bruce, who copied that old tower to make a matching one on the right. Charles himself never set foot in it.

   Mary Queen of Scots lived inside the old tower from 1561. On the evening of 9 March 1566 she was at supper in a tiny room off her bedchamber with her secretary, the Italian musician David Rizzio. Her husband, Lord Darnley, came up a private stair with armed nobles. They dragged Rizzio away from the queen, who was six months pregnant, and stabbed him dozens of times. Guides still mention a stain on the floor, which is legend, not forensic fact.

   Within a year Darnley himself was dead, found strangled in a garden at Kirk o' Field after an explosion, and Mary had married the man widely suspected of arranging it. Later kings tried to fill the place with dignity instead. Inside hangs a gallery of nearly ninety portraits of Scottish monarchs painted in the 1680s by Jacob de Wet, many of them legendary kings who almost certainly never existed, and several suspiciously alike.

   In September 1745 Bonnie Prince Charlie held court here for about six weeks, with a ball in that same gallery, before marching south. Today the King comes every summer for a week of ceremonies and a garden party. Now look to the left of the palace front, where roofless Gothic arches rise beside the old tower: the ruins of Holyrood Abbey.

6. 6. Holyrood Abbey: The Stag, the Cross and the Royal Vault

   Palace of Holyroodhouse, Canongate, Edinburgh EH8 8DX, UK

   Lift your eyes to the broken west front of the abbey beside the palace tower, its pointed doorway still lined with carved arcades, and behind it a roofless nave of tall arches open to the sky. Grass grows where the floor once was, and birds sit on the empty window ledges. This ruin is the reason the palace, the Canongate and even the word Holyrood exist at all.

   The legend goes like this. In 1128 King David I went hunting on the feast of the Holy Cross, against the advice of his confessor. In the forest below the crags, a great stag knocked him from his horse and was about to gore him, when a cross appeared between its antlers and the beast fled. In thanks, David founded an abbey of the Holy Rood, the holy cross, on this spot. The antlers on Canongate Kirk are that stag.

   Kings were born, married, crowned and buried here. James II was born in the abbey in 1430, married Mary of Guelders here in 1449, and was laid to rest here in 1460. James IV married Margaret Tudor here in 1503, and Charles I was crowned in this church in 1633. In the royal vault lie David II, James V and Lord Darnley, along with the bones brought from Trinity College Kirk, said to be Mary of Guelders.

   Then the ruin began. When James VII made the nave his Catholic Chapel Royal, an anti-Catholic mob stormed it in December 1688 and broke into the royal tombs. In 1758 a heavy new stone roof was laid on the old, weakened walls, and ten years later, in 1768, it came crashing down. Nobody ever rebuilt it.

   The Romantics adored it. In the summer of 1829 the young composer Felix Mendelssohn wandered into this roofless chapel at dusk and wrote that he had found there the beginning of his Scottish Symphony. Stand still for a moment and you may hear what he meant. Now walk back out past the palace gates to Abbey Strand and turn right into Abbeyhill, where a tiny stone building leans against the old garden wall.

7. 7. Queen Mary's Bath House: A Legend in Wine

   Abbeyhill, Edinburgh EH8, UK

   Squeezed against the old palace wall at the corner of Abbeyhill, there is a tiny two-storey building of rough grey stone with a steep roof, like a doll's house built for a medieval queen. It is barely bigger than a garden shed, and yet it carries one of the most delicious legends in Edinburgh.

   The story goes that Mary Queen of Scots came here to bathe, and not in water. She bathed, they say, in sweet white wine, to keep her famously pale and luminous complexion. Some versions swap the wine for goat's milk. Victorian visitors were shown the spot with great solemnity. There is not a scrap of evidence that any of it ever happened.

   Historians think the little building, which dates from the sixteenth century, was a pavilion or summer house at the corner of the palace gardens, perhaps a lookout over the road, perhaps a doocot, perhaps simply somewhere pleasant to sit. In Mary's time the palace was wrapped in gardens, orchards and courtyards, with a hunting park beyond, and small buildings like this were part of the pleasures of court life.

   Why do legends cling to Mary? Because her real life already sounds invented. Queen at six days old, sent to France at five, queen of France at sixteen and a widow at eighteen, she ruled in Scotland for barely six years, then spent nineteen years as a captive in England before the axe fell at Fotheringhay in 1587. Beside that, a bath of wine sounds almost reasonable. Legends fill the silences of a woman whose own letters were later used against her.

   Now for the longest stretch of the walk. Head back past the foot of the Canongate and follow Horse Wynd along the side of the palace, south into Holyrood Park. On the Queen's Drive, at the foot of the slope, look for a small stone well-house sunk into the grassy bank.

8. 8. St Margaret's Well & the Debtors' Sanctuary

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

   Bend down to the low stone front set into the grassy bank, with its small pointed opening. Inside, if you peer into the shadow, there is a vaulted chamber whose roof springs from a single central pillar, like a stone umbrella. This is St Margaret's Well, and just like the apse where you started, it travelled here stone by stone from somewhere else.

   The well-house was built in the fifteenth century at Restalrig, a village to the north-east, over a spring dedicated to Saint Margaret, the English-born queen of King Malcolm III, who died at Edinburgh Castle in 1093 and was made a saint in 1250. In 1860 railway works covered the old site, and the chamber was taken down and rebuilt here in the royal park.

   You are standing in Holyrood Park, a royal hunting ground since the Middle Ages. James V enclosed it with a wall around 1540, and it still belongs to the Crown. Strangely, for centuries it was also a refuge. The abbey's ancient right of sanctuary covered its whole precinct, this park included, and long after the monks had gone, the law still respected it for one kind of fugitive: the debtor.

   So the Abbey Lairds were born. Men who could not pay their debts fled past those brass letters S in the road, rented rooms in the cramped houses around Abbey Strand, and lived in safety, strolling over the crags with a view of the city that was hunting them. On Sundays, when no arrests for debt were allowed, they crossed into town to see friends, then hurried back before midnight. The writer Thomas De Quincey sheltered here from creditors in the 1830s.

   The most glamorous Abbey Laird was royal. The Comte d'Artois, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, lived in the palace from 1796, partly to keep his creditors at bay, and came back in 1830 after losing his throne as Charles X of France. Imprisonment for debt in Scotland was abolished in 1880, and the sanctuary faded away. Now walk back to the Canongate and climb its left-hand side to the tall, severe house wedged among the Parliament buildings.

9. 9. Queensberry House: The Union and the Kitchen Spit

   64 Canongate, Edinburgh EH8, UK

   Pause beside the Parliament's modern buildings and find the tall, severe house with a harled front, rows of plain windows and a steep roof, wedged among them like an elderly relative at a wedding. Queensberry House was built around 1681, and it has watched one Scottish parliament end and another begin.

   In the 1680s it was bought by William Douglas, the first Duke of Queensberry. His son James, the second Duke, became the most important politician of his age as Queen Anne's commissioner, the man who steered the Treaty of Union through the Scottish Parliament in 1707. Scotland's parliament voted itself out of existence, and crowds in the High Street jeered and pelted the duke's coach.

   Now the gruesome part, which is told as legend. The duke's eldest son, the Earl of Drumlanrig, was mentally ill and kept locked away. On the day the Union was passed, the story goes, the whole household rushed out to watch, leaving the earl alone with a young kitchen boy. When they came home, they found the boy roasting on the spit and the earl eating him. People called it a judgement on the duke for selling Scotland.

   After the dukes left, the house slid downhill like the Canongate itself. It became a barracks, then a refuge for the destitute, then a hospital for the elderly. At the end of the twentieth century Scotland voted for a new parliament, and Queensberry House was absorbed into the Holyrood complex, which opened in 2004. The building where the old parliament's end was managed now houses offices of the new one.

   There is a royal thread through all of this. The Union of 1707 joined two parliaments, but the crowns had already been united since 1603, when James VI rode south to become James I of England. One Stuart king and one Stuart queen, a century apart, and the Canongate lost first its court and then its parliament. Continue uphill on this side of the Canongate to the gabled museum with Latin mottoes carved on its front.

10. 10. Museum of Edinburgh & Acheson House

    142 Canongate, Edinburgh EH8 8DD, UK

    Take in the tall front of Huntly House, now the Museum of Edinburgh, with its three gables stepping out over the street and, set into the wall, stone panels carved with Latin mottoes. People nicknamed it the speaking house. One panel says, in Latin, as you are master of your tongue, so am I master of my ears. It is a building with opinions, and it shares them with passers-by.

    Inside, the museum keeps one of the most dangerous documents in Scottish history: an original copy of the National Covenant of 1638. When King Charles I tried to impose a new prayer book on Scotland, thousands of Scots swore to defend their kirk against royal interference, and they signed great parchments like this one. Legend says some signed in their own blood.

    That oath led to war. Within a few years Scotland and England were caught up in the conflicts that ended with Charles losing his head in London in 1649. The Canongate, so close to the palace, felt every turn of royal fortune: courtiers arriving, courtiers fleeing, soldiers billeted in its closes, and families who had built their fortunes on the king's favour wondering whose side to be on next.

    Now duck into Bakehouse Close, the passage beside the museum, to find Acheson House. It was built in 1633, the very year Charles I came to Edinburgh for his Scottish coronation, for Sir Archibald Acheson, his Secretary of State for Scotland. Above a doorway look for the carved initials of Archibald and his wife Margaret, and the crowing cockerel of the family crest. It is a royal servant's townhouse, built in the brief sunny moment before the storm.

    The museum also holds the collar and feeding bowl of Greyfriars Bobby, a small dog with an enormous fan club. Come back out to the Canongate and keep climbing on the same side of the street to the corner of St John Street, where a grand old house pushes a stone balcony out over the pavement.

11. 11. Moray House & St John's Cross: A Balcony of Plots

    Canongate & St John Street, Edinburgh EH8, UK

    Stop under the stone balcony jutting out over the Canongate from Moray House, with its tall gateway topped by stone pyramids. Nearby, close to the corner of St John Street, is the site of the old St John's Cross. Two very different royal moments happened within a few steps of where you are standing.

    The first is a happy one. In 1633 Charles I, arriving for his Scottish coronation, was greeted here by the magistrates, and tradition says that at the cross he knighted the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Alexander Clerk. Bells, banners, speeches, a king in his finery, and not the slightest hint of what was coming for him.

    The second moment is darker. Moray House was built around 1625 for the Dowager Countess of Home and later passed to the Earls of Moray. In May 1650 the Marquis of Montrose, the king's most brilliant general, was carried up the Canongate on a cart to be hanged. On this balcony stood a wedding party celebrating the marriage of the Earl of Moray's daughter to the son of Montrose's great enemy, the Marquis of Argyll. The story goes that they jeered as he passed, and someone spat.

    Two years earlier, in 1648, Oliver Cromwell had lodged in this very house, and it is said he discussed the fate of Charles I here with Argyll. Then in 1707, according to a persistent legend, commissioners of the Treaty of Union met in a summerhouse in the garden behind to sign their papers away from the angry crowds, and fled to a cellar when they were discovered.

    Since the middle of the nineteenth century the house has trained teachers, and it now belongs to the University of Edinburgh. Generations of Scottish schoolteachers learned their craft in a house of balconies and plots. Keep climbing the Canongate to the crossroads at the top, where the World's End pub stands on the corner, and look down at the road.

12. 12. The World's End & the Netherbow Port

    4 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TB, UK

    Glance down at the line of brass markers set into the road where the High Street meets St Mary's Street and Jeffrey Street. They trace the outline of the Netherbow Port, the great eastern gate of Edinburgh, with its tower and spire, which stood here until 1764. On the corner, the pub called the World's End keeps alive what the gate once meant.

    For centuries the Canongate outside this gate was a separate burgh, with its own council, tolbooth and church, first belonging to Holyrood Abbey and later to the Crown and its grantees. Poorer people inside the walls, the story goes, rarely passed through, because coming back in meant paying a toll. For them the world simply ended here. The two burghs were only formally merged in 1856.

    The gate was a stage for royal power. The heads of executed rebels were displayed on spikes above it, as a warning to anyone entering the city. Royal processions passed beneath it on their way between the castle at the top of the hill and the palace at the bottom, and every king and queen you have met today knew this arch.

    At dawn on 17 September 1745, the gate decided the fate of the city. A coach was let out through the Netherbow, and as the gates swung open, Highlanders of Cameron of Lochiel's regiment, waiting nearby, rushed in. Edinburgh fell to Bonnie Prince Charlie without a shot fired, and that same day he rode into Holyroodhouse, where you stood an hour ago.

    The gate was pulled down in 1764 to ease the traffic, but its bell, cast in 1621, is preserved at the Scottish Storytelling Centre a few doors up, beside John Knox House. You have walked from a lost queen's church to a palace, an abbey and a sanctuary, and back to the gate where the city ended. Here, at the World's End, the walk ends too.