Painted, Carved and Planted: Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens and the Mound

From the faces of the Portrait Gallery to a French fountain beneath the Castle: a Gothic rocket for Walter Scott, Playfair's temples of art, a hill made of rubble, a clock of flowers and a soldier bear in bronze, all on the bed of a vanished loch

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

1. 1. Scottish National Portrait Gallery: A Palace of Faces

   1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD, UK

   Tilt your head back at the red sandstone palace in front of you, all pointed arches, pinnacles and carved niches, with statues of Scottish poets, thinkers and monarchs standing high on its walls. On a street of sober grey Georgian terraces, it looks like a Gothic palace that has wandered in from Venice. This is the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and it was built to hold faces.

   It opened in 1889, designed by the architect Robert Rowand Anderson and paid for by John Ritchie Findlay, owner of The Scotsman newspaper, who believed the nation should be able to look its own history in the eye. It is often described as the first building in the world designed specifically as a portrait gallery, a museum not of art movements but of people.

   If the doors are open, step into the Great Hall and tip your head back again. Running around the walls is a painted procession by William Hole, finished in the late 1890s, of famous Scots from the ancient past to the nineteenth century: warriors, saints, kings, scientists and poets, all walking in the same direction as if late for a train. Above them the ceiling glitters with golden stars and constellations.

   On the gallery walls hang many of the people you will meet on this walk: Walter Scott, Robert Burns in Alexander Nasmyth's famous portrait, Mary Queen of Scots, Bonnie Prince Charlie. In 2011 a major renovation reopened spaces and windows that had been closed off for decades, and let daylight back into a building that had grown gloomy.

   Notice how the warm red stone stands out from everything around it, a building that refuses to blend in. Now walk east to St Andrew Square, cross it on the diagonal path, and follow St Andrew Street down to Princes Street. Turn left to the great hotel with the clock tower at the corner of North Bridge.

2. 2. The Balmoral Clock: Three Minutes Fast

   1 Princes Street, Edinburgh EH2 2EQ, UK

   Crane your neck at the clock tower of The Balmoral, rising above the east end of Princes Street with its big round faces. Now check the time on your phone. If the tower is about three minutes ahead of you, nothing is broken. It has been doing that on purpose for more than a century.

   The hotel opened in 1902 as the North British Station Hotel, built by the North British Railway right on top of Waverley Station below. Its clock was set fast so that travellers rushing down to the platforms would not miss their trains. The one night of the year when it tells the exact time is Hogmanay, so that the whole city can count down to midnight properly.

   The architect was William Hamilton Beattie, and he also designed the building you can see further along Princes Street, at the corner of St David Street: the former Jenners department store, where carved stone women hold up the upper floors like caryatids on a Greek temple. Jenners was founded in 1838 and became the grandest shop in Scotland, with royal warrants on its walls. It closed after more than 180 years of trading, and the building is being given a new life.

   The hotel took the name The Balmoral in 1991, after the royal estate in Aberdeenshire. In January 2007 J.K. Rowling finished writing the last Harry Potter book in one of its rooms, number 552, and wrote a note to mark the moment on a marble bust in the room. Fans have been asking about that room ever since.

   Beneath your feet, trains rumble in and out of a deep valley. Two and a half centuries ago that valley held a foul, stagnant loch. Walk west along Princes Street to Waverley Bridge, turn onto it, and stop at the parapet to look down into the station.

3. 3. Waverley Bridge & the Lost Nor' Loch

   Waverley Bridge, Edinburgh EH1, UK

   Lean on the parapet of Waverley Bridge and look down at the glass roofs of the station spreading through the valley, trains sliding in from both ends, with the cliff of Old Town tenements on one side and Princes Street on the other. You are looking at one of the very few railway stations in the world named after a novel.

   Waverley was Walter Scott's first novel, published anonymously in 1814, the story of a young Englishman swept up in the Jacobite rising of 1745. It was such a sensation that his following books were sold simply as the work of the author of Waverley. When the railway took over this valley in the 1840s, the station soon took that name too, a tribute to the city's most celebrated writer.

   Before any of this, the valley held the Nor' Loch, a lake created in the fifteenth century to protect the Old Town's northern flank. For three hundred years the city poured its sewage, rubbish and slaughterhouse waste down the slope into it. People drowned in it, by accident and on purpose, and it is often said that women accused of witchcraft were ducked in its water, a reminder of how cruel those trials were.

   In 1759 the draining began, so that Edinburgh could break out across the valley into a planned New Town. It took decades of work. The eastern end became gardens, the railway took the bottom, and a medieval church was demolished to make room for the tracks. Every garden on this walk grows on the bed of that vanished loch.

   Now look west along the valley to the tall, dark spire rising out of the trees like a Gothic rocket on a launch pad. It is the monument to the man who gave the station its name. Walk back up to Princes Street, turn left, and go into East Princes Street Gardens to stand at its foot.

4. 4. The Scott Monument: A Gothic Rocket for a Novelist

   East Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh EH2 2EJ, UK

   Stand at the foot of the Scott Monument and follow its blackened spire up and up, through tiers of pinnacles, arches and flying buttresses, to a tip more than sixty metres above you. Under the canopy at the bottom sits Sir Walter Scott in white marble, a book in his hand and his deerhound Maida at his feet. It is the largest monument to a writer anywhere in the world.

   The design was chosen in a competition in the late 1830s, and the winner was a surprise. George Meikle Kemp was a joiner and self-taught draughtsman who had spent years walking around Scotland sketching medieval abbeys such as Melrose. He entered under a pseudonym, John Morvo, borrowing the name of a medieval master mason of Melrose Abbey. It was an extraordinary choice: a monumental public commission for a man with no architectural practice at all.

   Kemp never saw it finished. On a foggy evening in March 1844, walking home along the Union Canal, he fell into the water and drowned. The monument was completed in 1846 without him, and you will find his grave later on this walk, in St Cuthbert's kirkyard at the far end of the gardens.

   Look closely at the niches: they hold dozens of small statues of characters from Scott's novels and poems, a stone crowd of heroines, outlaws and kings. The marble Scott was carved by John Steell, a sculptor you will meet again by the Floral Clock. And the dark colour is not paint. It is generations of coal smoke soaked into the sandstone, and restorers decided against scrubbing it off because that would have harmed the stone.

   If your legs are willing, two hundred and eighty-seven steps lead up ever narrower stairs to the highest gallery, with the whole city at your feet. Afterwards, walk west through the gardens towards the two Greek temples at the foot of the Mound, and stop at the one further from Princes Street, the Scottish National Gallery.

5. 5. Playfair's Temples: Scottish National Gallery & Royal Scottish Academy

   The Mound, Edinburgh EH2 2EL, UK

   Stand between the two temples at the foot of the Mound and compare them. The one nearer Princes Street, with heavy Doric columns and a statue of Queen Victoria on its roof, is the Royal Scottish Academy. The one behind, with lighter Ionic columns and long blind walls, is the Scottish National Gallery. Both are by one architect, William Henry Playfair, the man who did most to make Edinburgh the Athens of the North.

   The front one came first, in the 1820s, built as the Royal Institution for the city's learned societies, and later handed to the Academy. The Gallery was begun in 1850, when Prince Albert laid its foundation stone, and opened in 1859. Its side walls have no windows for a good reason: the paintings inside were meant to be lit from above, without glare.

   Inside are some of the best-loved pictures in Scotland. A minister in a black coat skates gracefully across Duddingston Loch, a little painting long credited to Henry Raeburn, though some experts have doubted it, and it has become an icon of the Scottish Enlightenment. There is Vermeer's earliest known painting, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, and Canova's marble Three Graces, owned jointly with London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

   The two temples are secretly joined. In 2004 a link was dug beneath the gardens, with galleries, a lecture theatre and a café, so that you can pass from one building to the other without seeing daylight. Deeper still, the trains you watched from Waverley Bridge rumble through tunnels in the Mound itself.

   And there is a quiet irony under your feet. The Mound is not a natural hill at all, but an enormous heap of soil and rubble. Walk up the Mound road beside the galleries, following its curve uphill, to the domed palace at the top, and you will hear how it was made. It is a steady climb, so take your time.

6. 6. The Top of the Mound: Geordie Boyd's Mud Brig

   The Mound, Edinburgh EH1 1YZ, UK

   Catch your breath at the top of the Mound and turn to the grand building on the corner, with its dome crowned by a gilded statue and its rich Baroque front facing across the valley to the New Town. This is the head office of the Bank of Scotland. It stands like a lighthouse on the edge of the Old Town, and the hill beneath it was built out of rubbish.

   The story starts with a tailor. In the 1780s George Boyd, a clothier in the Lawnmarket, was tired of the long detour around the boggy valley to reach the new houses on the other side, so he began dumping rubble across the bed of the drained loch to make a path. Locals called it Geordie Boyd's Mud Brig. Then the city realised it had found the perfect place to dump the earth being dug out for the foundations of the New Town.

   For decades carts tipped soil here, around two million loads by the usual estimate, until a muddy path became a man-made hill linking the old city and the new. In the nineteenth century it was graded, paved and crowned with Playfair's temples. Every step you just climbed was carried here by hand, horse and cart from somebody's cellar in the New Town.

   The bank itself is the oldest in Scotland, founded by an act of the Scottish Parliament in 1695, and it began issuing paper banknotes within a year. Its head office here was first built in the early 1800s as a plainer building, then wrapped in its present Baroque costume in the 1860s by the architect David Bryce. Even banks need a makeover.

   From here the view runs straight down over the gallery roofs and across the valley to Princes Street. Now walk a few steps back and turn into Mound Place, then climb Ramsay Lane towards the Castle, until you reach a cluster of red-roofed towers and white walls that looks like a fairy-tale village.

7. 7. Ramsay Garden: Poets, Painters and a Dreamer

   Ramsay Garden, Edinburgh EH1, UK

   Gaze up at the jumble of red-roofed towers, white harled walls, timber balconies and bay windows piled up below the Castle. It looks like a village from a fairy tale, invented by someone who loved both old Scotland and the Arts and Crafts movement. That someone was a biologist, a town planner and a visionary called Patrick Geddes.

   The oldest part of the cluster is an octagonal house built around 1740 by the poet Allan Ramsay, a wig-maker turned bookseller and publisher who wrote in Scots. Edinburgh wits mocked its round shape as the goose pie, and Ramsay complained about it to a friend, a judge. The story goes that the judge replied that now he saw Ramsay inside it, he understood the name perfectly well.

   His son, also called Allan Ramsay, became one of the finest portrait painters of the eighteenth century and principal painter to King George III. You walked past his elegant portraits in the National Gallery a few minutes ago. In the 1890s Geddes rebuilt the site around the old house as flats for university teachers and a hall of residence for students, believing that town and gown should live side by side in the heart of the Old Town, not flee it.

   Geddes wanted beauty inside as well as out. He invited the Celtic Revival painter John Duncan to decorate rooms here with scenes from Celtic legend, part of what Geddes hoped would be a Scottish renaissance in art and thought. Next door he ran the Outlook Tower, with its camera obscura, as a kind of observatory for studying the city.

   The poet Ramsay, the painter Ramsay and the dreamer Geddes all shaped the art of this city from one steep corner. Now walk back down Ramsay Lane and the Mound, and at the bottom go through the gate into West Princes Street Gardens beside the Academy, where a clock made of flowers is waiting.

8. 8. The Floral Clock & the Poet in a Nightcap

   West Princes Street Gardens, Princes Street, Edinburgh EH2, UK

   Crouch down by the sloping flowerbed just inside the gate and watch: the hands of this clock are moving, and they are planted. Thousands of tiny plants in carefully chosen colours form the dial, the numbers and a design that changes every year. Above it, on a tall pedestal, Allan Ramsay himself looks down in a soft cap instead of a wig.

   The Floral Clock was created in 1903 by the city's parks superintendent, John McHattie, and it is said to be the first floral clock in the world. The original clockwork was hidden in the pedestal of the Ramsay statue and turned the hands through a shaft, and it had to be wound by hand. A cuckoo was added in 1952, and it still pops out of its little house to mark the quarter hours.

   Planting it is a summer art form. Each year the gardeners use tens of thousands of plants to make a pattern celebrating an anniversary, an institution or a cause, and even the hands are planted, carrying living greenery round and round the dial. Since 1973 the clock has been driven by electricity, so nobody has to wind it any more.

   The man on the pedestal deserves a moment. Allan Ramsay opened one of the first circulating libraries in Britain, lending books from his shop in the 1720s, to the horror of ministers who feared that novels and plays would corrupt the young. In 1736 he even opened a theatre, and the authorities soon shut it down. His statue was carved by John Steell, the same sculptor who made the marble Walter Scott.

   From here, the whole of West Princes Street Gardens opens out below the Castle rock. Walk west along the upper path, past the bronze horseman of the Royal Scots Greys, to a long bronze frieze of marching men with a young soldier seated in front of them.

9. 9. The Call 1914 & Wojtek the Soldier Bear

   West Princes Street Gardens, Princes Street, Edinburgh EH2, UK

   Stand in front of the young soldier sitting on his bronze rock, a rifle across his knees, gazing up towards the Castle as if he has just heard something. Behind him, a long frieze shows men stepping out of their ordinary lives, workers, farmers and students, with pipers at their head, all moving towards the war. This is The Call, 1914, the Scottish American War Memorial.

   It was paid for by Americans of Scottish descent and unveiled in 1927 as a gift to Scotland, in memory of the Scots who fought in the First World War. The sculptor, Robert Tait McKenzie, was Canadian-born and worked in Philadelphia. He was also a doctor and a pioneer of physical education who had treated wounded soldiers, and he knew bodies from the inside. Look at how carefully he modelled the young man's hands.

   The frieze is not triumphant. These men are walking into a war that killed a terrible number of Scots, and McKenzie shows them earnest, uncertain and ordinary. Edinburgh has dozens of war memorials, but this quiet one is among the finest pieces of public sculpture in the city.

   A few steps west stands a very different bronze: a soldier walking beside a large bear. This is Wojtek, adopted as a cub in Iran in 1942 by soldiers of the Polish II Corps. He travelled with them through the Middle East and on to Italy, where, to get him aboard a troopship, they enlisted him officially as a private. At Monte Cassino in 1944, the story goes, he helped carry crates of artillery shells.

   After the war the Polish soldiers were stationed in the Scottish Borders, with Wojtek, who then went to Edinburgh Zoo and lived there until 1963. Old comrades visited and threw him cigarettes, which he ate. The statue by Alan Herriot was unveiled in 2015. Now continue west to the end of the gardens and climb up to Princes Street at the corner of Lothian Road, by the Gothic church of St John.

10. 10. St John's Church: The Episcopalians Come Back

    Princes Street & Lothian Road, Edinburgh EH2 4BJ, UK

    Take in the tall Gothic church at the corner of Princes Street and Lothian Road, with its pinnacled tower and long, delicate windows, like a small English cathedral parked at the end of the city's main street. This is St John's, an Episcopal church, and its very existence is a quiet story about kings.

    After 1689, when most Scottish bishops refused to swear loyalty to William of Orange in place of the exiled Stuart king James VII, the Episcopal Church was pushed to the margins. Many of its people were Jacobites, praying for the Stuarts in back rooms and lofts, and after the rising of 1745 harsh penal laws restricted their worship. Only in 1792, once the Episcopalians agreed to pray for King George III, were those laws lifted.

    St John's, built between 1816 and 1818 to designs by William Burn, announced that Episcopalians were back in the respectable heart of the city. Picture the first congregations stepping in, gentlemen in tall hats and ladies in bonnets, into a church that would have been unthinkable for their grandparents. Step inside if it is open and tip your head back: the nave ceiling is a lace of Gothic plaster vaulting, and the windows hold a remarkable collection of nineteenth-century stained glass, glowing like a picture book of saints.

    In the middle of the nineteenth century its most famous clergyman was Dean Edward Ramsay, a kind and witty man whose collection of Scottish anecdotes became a bestseller. Remember his name, because at the end of this walk you will meet a fountain that he publicly condemned as indecent. Even the most charming dean has his limits.

    Around the church lie graves of Georgian and Victorian Edinburgh families, beneath a terrace that looks out over the traffic of Lothian Road. Now take the path down beside the church into the hollow below, where a second and much older church hides with its kirkyard: St Cuthbert's.

11. 11. St Cuthbert's Kirk & Kirkyard Under the Castle

    5 Lothian Road, Edinburgh EH1 2EP, UK

    Walk down into the hollow and look around: a crowded kirkyard of tilted gravestones, carved urns and mossy obelisks, with the Castle rock rearing above, and in the middle a church with a tall, slender spire. You have stepped below street level into one of the oldest places of worship in Edinburgh. Tradition says Christians have prayed here for well over a thousand years.

    The church is named after Saint Cuthbert, the seventh-century monk of Lindisfarne, and a church on this spot is recorded in the Middle Ages, standing beside the waters of the Nor' Loch. The present building is mostly from the 1890s, designed by Hippolyte Blanc, but its spire is older, from 1789. Inside, look for a stained-glass window from the New York studio of Louis Comfort Tiffany, a rare thing to find in Scotland.

    Now find the round watchtower at the corner of the kirkyard. It was built in 1827 so that watchmen could guard fresh graves at night. In those years Edinburgh's medical schools needed bodies for dissection, and body-snatchers dug up the newly buried to sell them to anatomists. It was grim, organised work, and towers like this one were the city's answer. Imagine a watchman up there on a winter night, lantern shuttered, a stout stick beside him, listening for the scrape of a spade.

    Among the graves lies George Meikle Kemp, the self-taught joiner who designed the Scott Monument and drowned before it was finished. Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, who once hid from his creditors in the sanctuary of Holyrood, is buried here too. Writers, architects and merchants of the Georgian city share these paths.

    Leave by the gate on the far side of the kirkyard, which opens into West Princes Street Gardens beneath the Castle. Look for a flash of turquoise and gold among the trees. It is the most scandalous fountain in Edinburgh, and the end of this walk.

12. 12. The Ross Fountain: Edinburgh's Scandalous Masterpiece

    West Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh EH2, UK

    Stand in front of the Ross Fountain and take it in: an explosion of cast iron painted in deep turquoise and gold, with women, children, lion masks and sea creatures tumbling around its basins, and behind it the Castle rock rising sheer and dark. It is the most theatrical view in Edinburgh.

    The fountain was made in France, at the foundry of Antoine Durenne, and shown at the International Exhibition in London in 1862. An Edinburgh gunmaker, Daniel Ross, saw it, bought it, and gave it to his city. It arrived in more than a hundred pieces, and by the time it was finally installed here in 1872, Ross himself had died.

    Then came the scandal. The women around the basin, representing science, the arts, poetry and industry, are draped only partly, and Dean Ramsay of St John's, the church you have just visited, condemned the fountain as grossly indecent. Good Victorian citizens averted their eyes. Edinburgh, being Edinburgh, complained loudly and left it exactly where it was.

    Over the next century the fountain rusted, faded and was often switched off. In 2017 it was taken apart piece by piece and sent away for restoration, and in 2018 it came back, painted again in bold colours and with water flowing for the first time in years. Some locals loved the new look, others found it a bit much, which is more or less what the Victorians said.

    Think about where you are standing. Not so long ago this was the bottom of the Nor' Loch, a place of sewage, rubbish and drowning. Today it is a garden with art at every turn: portraits and temples, a Gothic spire, a clock of flowers, soldiers and a bear in bronze, and a fountain once called indecent. Edinburgh drained its swamp and filled it with beauty. Find a bench, look up at the Castle, and enjoy it.