Quick Summary
Where? Edinburgh, Scotland.
When? January 2024.
How long? The weekend.
How? EasyJet from London Stansted to Airport, returning to London Luton.
What did I read on the plane? One of the City Between series by WR Gingell set in Australia. This is a great fantasy series about a human girl who ends up as the sidekick to a trio of mercurial fae, helping them solve murders and other mysteries.
My favourite thing? Holyrood Palace and Abbey.
My least favourite thing? The unexpected quietness in the mornings and evenings.
Background
My first trip of 2024 was to Edinburgh, a city which turned out to be brilliant. My friend Lily and I managed to pack in almost everything we wanted to see on a hectic 2-day trip. Edinburgh is absolutely saturated in history, which as a history buff made it perfect for me. Mid-January was also a good time to go as it wasn’t too crowded and (surprisingly) wasn’t too cold, at least if you’d dressed appropriately.
Getting there
Lily and I flew up via EasyJet on a Friday night from Stansted Airport at 9.45pm, landing just over an hour later at Edinburgh Airport. The flights cost £60 basic fare.
Readers of my Venice post may recall that on my last EasyJet trip, I was charged an extra £50 for oversized luggage. You’ll be pleased to know that on this occasion, I travelled with just a backpack (Nordace Siena Pro 13, great for internal storage) and had no issues. The flights were also much emptier this time so the check-in people were possibly less motivated to gate-check us.
Getting from Edinburgh Airport to the city centre is very simple; there’s a direct bus from right outside the airport which costs £8 for a return ticket. We had booked the Travelodge on Central Rose Street, a no-frills 3-star hotel in a great location for £150 across two nights. This was just a short walk away from the city centre bus stop. The Travelodge was perfectly serviceable as a place to sleep, though the shower was on the grimy side and I’ve never seen public-bathroom-style soap dispensers in a hotel room before. Still, there were no bloodstains on the bedsheets so it was already infinitely superior to my Venice guestroom.
Itinerary: Day One
The sky at 8 am on a Saturday morning was almost violet, and the streets were all but empty.
Since we’d flown in the night before, we got up nice and early at around 7.30 am and headed for breakfast at Zaza’s Coffee House, a cute, decently-priced café a few minutes from Edinburgh Castle. It’s on top of the Mound, a steep-ish slope you need to climb in order to reach the castle and other attractions.
Zaza’s Coffee House offers a great view of Castlehill.
More importantly for my purposes, it’s halal, so I was able to try a halal haggis scone which was quite nice. As the place opens at 8, we were the first ones through the door, and were able to linger over our food since the castle doesn’t open until 9.30 am. Hanging about in the castle courtyard before opening time also meant we could take some great shots of Edinburgh below over the walls, as the whole edifice is strategically perched on Castle Hill. It was a cold January day, there were very few people about, and the sun hadn’t yet burnt off the mist shrouding the apex of Arthur’s Seat… it was incredibly atmospheric.
I strongly recommend booking tickets beforehand and showing up early to the castle, as it’s massive and we benefitted from there not being too many other people about at opening time. To my regret, we didn’t shell out for the audio guide for the castle, but as you wander the grounds you’ll come across a bunch of smaller museums and exhibitions (e.g. the National War Museum, the Honours of Scotland crown jewels) which have signs.
Looking down from Edinburgh Castle. The vivid blue line in the distance is the Firth of Forth; the One o’Clock Gun was instituted so that ships in the firth would be able to set their timepieces accurately.
We were done with the castle by around 12pm and headed down the Royal Mile, a long street sloping down from the castle to Holyrood Palace. It’s filled with countless restaurants, cafes, and shops inviting tourists to buy Scottish items. We stopped for a quick lunch of pasties at Mòr Bakehouse.
A side view of Holyrood Palace.
At Holyrood, there are no timed entry slot tickets – the ticket covers the whole day. This one has a free audio guide, which narrates the history of the palace, former base of the Stuart kings and now of course the monarch’s Edinburgh residence. The guide finishes up with 12th-century Holyrood Abbey, the roofless ruins of which buttress the palace against the backdrop of Arthur’s Seat. One of my favourite new facts was learning that Arthur’s Seat is in fact an ancient volcano, and has been used as a defensive base since prehistoric times. It’s essentially a medium-sized hill behind the palace (imagine being a king living in the shadow of a volcano!) and can be climbed relatively easily, though we had no time to do so.
Inside Holyrood Abbey.
Next on our list for the day was the Surgeon’s Hall Museums. Like the Hunterian Museum in London, it’s devoted to items of medical and surgical significance, and it is INCREDIBLE. Seeing a pocketbook with a leather cover made from William Burke’s skin after he was executed and dissected is a particular standout. (Burke, along with his accomplice William Hare, committed what is possibly Scotland’s most infamous series of murders; throughout 1828 the pair killed 16 people and sold the bodies to the local medical school for dissection, since there was such a shortage of corpses).
Another exhibit which impressed itself on my mind is a series of three hearts taken from murder victims who had been stabbed with various implements, alongside the object that killed them. The heart of a seven-year-old boy who was stabbed by his father with a fork clearly has the imprint of the three prongs running through it.
It’s probably a combination of the dark time of year and my own interests, which lean towards areas such as true crime, but Edinburgh felt to me like an incredibly morbid city, with as much history as London but much more oriented around death and violence. Perhaps the image of the castle looming over the city has something to do with that also. It was certainly a sobering trip, overall, in that it made me very conscious of my own mortality. Perhaps not quite what you expect to get out of an Edinburgh getaway…
The evening view as we exited the Surgeons’ Hall Museums.
Anyway, at 5pm we made our way to the meeting point for the free walking tour we’d booked. The sun had set by then so it was time to explore the ‘dark side’ of Edinburgh. Only 7 of the 14 who’d booked showed up (apparently this is normal) and our guide started leading us through the city. The beginning was annoyingly corny, a few thin ghost stories which the guide reeled off by rote. Then we progressed to the actual history and the tour got much better. We looked down on Waverley station, home of the former Nor Loch, effectively a sewage dump in the middle of the city which was famous for suicides; saw St Andrew’s House, now headquarters of the Scottish government, which used to be Calton Gaol; climbed Calton Hill to get a view of the night-time city lights; and finished off in Canongate Kirkyard, burial place of Adam Smith. It was an enjoyable way to spend two hours and see the city, though fact-checking some of the historical titbits when I got back to the hotel revealed them to be legends rather than truth.
We finished up with the tour around 7pm, and then made the surprising discovery that Edinburgh had become very quiet. It was a Saturday night, not that late, in a capital city – yet there really were very few people around, and those people were all clustered around the tourist area of the Royal Mile. We passed hardly anyone on our way back to the hotel after dinner, at around 9pm. (Sadly, the more Scottish joints on the Royal Mile were either booked out or had long lines, so Pizza Express it was).
Itinerary: Day Two
The day started off colder, about six degrees, but overall I was surprised by how temperate Edinburgh was that weekend. Yes, I’d wrapped up in multiple layers and had a winter coat on, but I’d expected my exposed skin e.g. my face to be feeling the chill – and it wasn’t.
The National Monument of Scotland.
Lily and I once more woke up on the early side (this is my philosophy whilst on holiday, I firmly believe you can sleep when you’re home) and went straight to Calton Hill, intent on taking sunrise shots. There are a handful of half-finished monuments atop the hill, such as the Parthenon-esque National Monument of Scotland, which made a nice backdrop. I climbed this – it’s higher than it looks!
Old Calton Burial Ground, built on a hill so rising gently.
We then proceeded to the Old Calton Burial Ground just opposite. I don’t necessarily believe in the peaceful rest of all the inhabitants, but I like the sense of stillness in cemeteries, and this one felt so still it was almost eerie. Even though the city is right outside the walls, once inside those urban sounds died away. There was nobody else around so we could wander at will up the gentle slope, over to David Hume’s grand tower in the corner. This reportedly had to be guarded for over a week after his death due to his widely-professed atheism.
Hume’s mausoleum.
It was now just past 9 am and so we found our way to Uplands Roast, a truck dispensing coffee and hot chocolate on the verge of a park. This place is apparently a TikTok sensation and it was certainly quite aesthetic. Sadly I didn’t get my marshmallows toasted in the vegan variant, and it was a bit too sweet for me, but the warmth was still very welcome. Lily and I then split up – she to check out more of the city, me to the National Museum of Scotland.
The hot chocolate from Uplands Roast.
The museum opens at 10 am (I got in just after) and is free. It spans about 6 floors and to properly examine each exhibit would take a whole day (if not more), so I ended up just doing a whistle-stop tour of my most anticipated exhibits – Dolly the Sheep, first animal to be cloned; the Lewis chessmen, a collection of intricately carved 12th-century ivory chess pieces found on the Isle of Lewis; and some mysterious voodoo-type dolls in tiny coffins found on Arthur’s Seat, whose purpose is unknown but may be an allusion to Burke and Hare. There is an online audio guide here, but I would skip it; to me, at least, the exhibits it highlights are actually the least interesting.
The dolls found on Arthur’s Seat in the 1830s by a boy playing.
For lunch Lily and I had lacklustre subs at the nearest Subway. I’d hoped to fit in St Giles’ Cathedral, the Scottish equivalent of Westminster Abbey, but that opens at 1 pm on Sundays and we had to leave at 1.15 pm to grab our backpacks from the hotel and catch the bus back to the airport. Our flight back to London was at 3.30 pm and, for a pleasant surprise, actually took off on time.
Edinburgh was an incredible city and although I saw almost everything on my list, I’d absolutely go back again. For one, I really need to redo the castle with the audio guide this time. For another, I need more time in the National Museum, and I’ve got to see St Giles’ Cathedral (no idea how that wasn’t on my list of must-sees when trip planning!)