I had been told by many people how beautiful Edinburgh is. And it is well worth a visit. My favourite place was St Giles Cathedral. It is a vibrant, very busy city filled with the noise of different languages. We have not been to any place yet, where we heard so many languages spoken.
We stayed at a lovely place recommended on Airbnb. It was a beautiful room with an en suite bathroom within a house (keeping costs down in expensive Edinburgh). It’s about a 30-minute walk to the famous Princes Street or you can catch a local bus which we did a few times.
Scott’s monument
One can spend many days exploring Edinburgh. We had a full day. We started at Scott’s Monument near the station. The Scott Monument was built in 1832 to commemorate the death of one of Scotland’s best loved writers, Sir Walter Scott, and is decorated with carvings of characters from his novels. The Gothic spire stands at the eastern end of Princes Street Gardens and is the largest memorial to a writer in the world. It stands at just over 200 feet high, and you can climb to the top.
There were of course many geocaches around Edinburgh and we did an adventure cache that has multiple stops and gives you some history at each point. We went to a tiny pub and had a drink and a very tasty meat pie. At this stage, we were near the Royal mile and again we were dumbstruck at how busy everything was and how many tourists there were.
There are lots of interesting people to see in the streets.
St Giles Cathedral
St Giles Cathedral is very beautiful on both the inside and outside. There was a very orderly queue to get in, which I think was influenced by the fact that it was the memorial period for Queen Elizabeth and she had been interred there a few days before.
St Giles’ Cathedral, founded in 1124 by King David I, has been a working church for almost 900 years. It is still an important centre for civic services such as the Kirking of the Parliament and services for Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle.
The cordoned off area is where the Queen was
Royal Museum of Scotland
It started to rain and we were not far from the Royal Museum of Scotland which I knew would provide shelter and some great exhibits. It has free entrance and is hugely impressive. It in fact has over 20 000 unique artifacts. We only spent a short time there and could have seen so much more. The sheep in the photo below is Dolly the sheep from the famous genetics experiment.
Dolly the world famous sheep
Calton Hill
Lastly we made our way to Calton Hill. The UNESCO World Heritage Site is home to a collection of historic monuments, most notably the National Monument, which was inspired by the Parthenon in Athens. Calton Hill gives an amazing 360 view of Edinburgh. We were rained on, but it didn’t last very long and soon the sun was shining and continued to provide a lovely backdrop to the Edinburgh skyline.
360 degree views across Edinburgh
