Edinburgh Audio Tours

Edinburgh sits on the remains of ancient volcanoes. Castle Rock, where the castle has stood since at least the twelfth century, is a volcanic plug, a column of hardened magma that resisted the grinding of glaciers while everything around it was scraped flat. Arthur's Seat, the extinct volcano to the east, gives you a 360-degree view of the city and the Firth of Forth from 251 metres for the cost of an hour's walk. The city grew outward from that geological accident, down from the rock along the Royal Mile to Holyrood Palace, and then sideways as the medieval closes and wynds filled in with centuries of tenement life.

The New Town, designed in 1766 by the twenty-three-year-old architect James Craig to relieve the Old Town's extraordinary overcrowding, represents the other Edinburgh: rational, Georgian, gridded, built on the confidence of the Scottish Enlightenment.

David Hume, Adam Smith, and James Hutton were all working in this city at the same time in the second half of the eighteenth century, producing philosophy, economics, and the foundations of modern geology simultaneously. The nickname 'Athens of the North' came from that generation, and the Parthenon-referencing folly on Calton Hill, which they ran out of money to finish, keeps the comparison visible.