Edinburgh has two faces.
The first is the one that most visitors encounter: the Castle on its volcanic rock, the Royal Mile running down toward Holyrood, the Grassmarket and the Canongate and the Old Town’s extraordinary medieval density. All of it is genuinely worth seeing, and none of it needs defending against the charge of being a tourist attraction.
The second Edinburgh is less obvious and considerably more interesting to those who have already met the first. It is the city that hides a Roman bath in a shopping centre car park, a literary institution so specific that it has served generations of Scottish writers without advertising its existence, a geological masterpiece that most visitors walk within metres of without seeing, and a graveyard so full of famous dead Scots that its custodians had to install locked iron cages over the most desirable coffins to prevent grave robbers from selling the contents to medical schools.
This guide covers Edinburgh’s finest hidden gems and the places that reward looking beyond the obvious.
Key Takeaways
- Edinburgh’s best hidden gems are concentrated in the Old Town, the New Town, and Leith, but several of the finest require a short journey to the fringes of the city.
- Most hidden gems in Edinburgh are free to visit or very low cost – the Writers’ Museum, the Surgeons’ Hall, Dunbar’s Close Garden, and the Radical Road walk are all free.
- The Edinburgh Underground Vaults – a network of sealed chambers beneath the South Bridge, inhabited by the very poorest of Edinburgh’s 18th-century poor – are one of the most atmospheric urban history experiences in Scotland and are accessible only on guided tours.
- Dean Village, despite becoming increasingly known, retains a quality of surprise that most visitors to Edinburgh never encounter because it requires a five-minute walk from the city centre that most do not think to make.
- Several of Edinburgh’s finest hidden gems are directly related to the city’s specific historical character: as a site of witchcraft trials, as the birthplace of modern medicine, as the city of the Scottish Enlightenment, and as the world capital of the body trade.
Old Town Secrets
The Edinburgh Vaults
Beneath the South Bridge structure built in the 1780s to connect the Old Town with the southern suburbs lies a network of vaulted chambers that were sealed in the early 19th century and not reopened until 1985.
The vaults were built into the bridge’s foundations as commercial space: cobblers, wine merchants, and tradespeople initially occupied them. As the bridge developed dampness problems and the better tenants moved out, the chambers became home to Edinburgh’s most desperate poor. It became home to the families living without light or ventilation in rooms that had no connection to the street above.
The vaults are only accessible on guided tours, which adds to their atmosphere: the route through the chambers by torchlight, with the history of their former inhabitants explained as you move through, creates one of the most genuinely unsettling and most historically instructive experiences in Edinburgh. Mercat Tours is the most consistently recommended operator.
Credit: Mercat Tours
Dunbar’s Close Garden
On the Canongate, a narrow close descends between two old tenement buildings into what looks, from the street, like nothing in particular.
At the bottom is a hidden garden designed in the style of a 17th-century Edinburgh pleasure garden. It’s a formal box hedging full of gravel paths, fruit trees trained against stone walls, and a quality of stillness that the closes of the Royal Mile rarely provide.
Dunbar’s Close Garden was created in 1978 by the Mushroom Trust and has been maintained as a public garden ever since. It is unmarked from the street, completely free to enter, and one of the most pleasant surprises available on a walk down the Canongate.
Credit: Atlas Obscura
The Writers’ Museum
Off the Lawnmarket, through Lady Stair’s Close, the Writers’ Museum occupies Lady Stair’s House. It’s a 1622 townhouse that contains the most important single collection of Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson memorabilia in the world.
Burns’s writing desk. Scott’s chess set. The printing press from Stevenson’s childhood bedroom. The manuscripts, the personal objects, and the furniture of three writers who, between them, shaped how Scotland is seen by the rest of the world.
The museum is free, uncrowded even in summer, and one of the finest small museums in Edinburgh. The courtyard outside, Makars’ Court, is paved with quotations from Scottish writers embedded in the stone.
Credit: Forever Edinburgh
Greyfriars Kirkyard
Greyfriars Kirkyard is not exactly hidden. It is mentioned in most Edinburgh guides but its depth is consistently underestimated by visitors who spend twenty minutes looking for the grave of Greyfriars Bobby rather than the hours required to understand what else is here.
The kirkyard is one of the most historically dense burial sites in Scotland. The Covenanters’ Prison (a walled enclosure in the kirkyard’s southwest corner) held over 1,200 Covenanters who were imprisoned here in brutal conditions in 1679 after the Battle of Bothwell Bridge. The Bluidy Mackenzie Mausoleum, the tomb of the man who imprisoned them, is Scotland’s most reputedly haunted building, opened for guided access on specific evenings.
The mortsafes, which are the heavy iron cages bolted over some of the graves, are perhaps the most unusual feature of the kirkyard: they were installed in the early 19th century to prevent body snatchers from digging up the recently dead and selling the corpses to Edinburgh’s medical schools, which had an insatiable demand for anatomical specimens.
The kirkyard rewards a full hour rather than a quick look.
Credit: Greyfriars Kirkyard
The Radical Road, Arthur’s Seat
Below the summit of Arthur’s Seat, a path called the Radical Road runs along the southern face of Salisbury Crags. It’s a geological formation that was instrumental in establishing the foundations of modern geology.
The crags themselves are a classic example of an unconformity: a visible boundary between two geological periods separated by millions of years, studied here in the late 18th century by James Hutton, whose observations led to the theory of deep time and the modern understanding of the age of the earth. The cliffs above the path were formed by a volcanic intrusion into older rocks approximately 340 million years ago; the contrast between the two rock types is clearly visible.
The path is named for the radical weavers from Paisley and Glasgow who were set to work building it in 1820 following the Radical War, as a way of employing men whose rebellion had been suppressed. The walk itself is one of Edinburgh’s finest: below the crags, above the city, with views of the Firth of Forth to the north and the full geology of Arthur’s Seat directly overhead.
Credit: Edinburgh Live
New Town Discoveries
Dean Village
Five minutes’ walk from Princes Street, down a steep lane to the Water of Leith, Dean Village is one of Edinburgh’s most unexpected architectural discoveries: a cluster of 19th-century grain mills and warehouses built in a riverside valley that has been inhabited since the 12th century, transformed in the 1980s and 1990s into residential accommodation, and now preserved in a state of picturesque unreality.
The village sits below the level of the city, which means it is entirely invisible from the streets above. The combination of Victorian stonework, the Water of Leith below, the Dean Bridge overhead, and the absence of traffic or noise gives Dean Village the quality of a place that has made a quiet agreement with the 21st century not to be seen.
The Water of Leith Walkway continues in both directions from Dean Village. It follows west toward Stockbridge and east toward Belford Bridge and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, both within twenty minutes on foot.
Credit: Dean Village – Wikipedia
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery on Queen Street is one of Edinburgh’s finest buildings and one of its most consistently overlooked major museums.
The Gothic Revival palace designed by Robert Rowand Anderson and completed in 1889 is extraordinary on its own terms: a frieze of Scottish historical figures runs along the exterior, the Great Hall inside is a vaulted space decorated with murals of Scottish history by William Hole, and the collection of portraits charts five centuries of Scottish life with a range and quality that few national portrait collections can match.
The museum is free. It is considerably less crowded than the National Museum of Scotland, two streets away, and provides a more specifically Scottish account of the nation’s history than any comparable institution.
Credit: Walk Run Cycle
Stockbridge Market
Every Sunday morning in Stockbridge, a farmers’ market takes place on Saunders Street. It’s a small market by the standards of any major city, but one of the finest in Scotland for the quality of what is available.
The producers who attend are from across the Edinburgh region and the wider Scottish Lowlands: artisan cheese, game, smoked fish from Arbroath, venison, fresh vegetables, and baked goods of real quality. The market is primarily a locals’ institution rather than a tourist one, which gives it an atmosphere that the more advertised Edinburgh markets do not match.
The village of Stockbridge that Edinburgh grew over rather than incorporating completely, has a character entirely its own: independent bookshops, a Saturday antiques market, one of Edinburgh’s finest florists, and the Stockbridge Colonies (distinctive rows of workers’ cottages from the 1860s, built by a cooperative building society for skilled workers who could not otherwise afford housing).
Credit: Grassmarket, Leith & Stockbridge
Beyond the Centre
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is one of the oldest botanic gardens in the world, that has been founded in 1670 and is one of Edinburgh’s finest and most freely accessible spaces, and one that many visitors to the city never reach because it sits a short distance north of the centre rather than on the main tourist route.
The glasshouses contain one of the world’s finest collections of living plants, including a Victorian Palm House that is among the tallest in Britain. The Rock Garden was built in the 1870s using stones brought from across Scotland and is one of the most intricate landscape constructions in Edinburgh. The Chinese Hillside, the Peat Garden, and the view south from the upper section of the garden, looking back across the Water of Leith toward the castle, are all worth the twenty-minute walk from the city centre.
Free to enter the outdoor garden; a small charge for the glasshouses.
Credit: BB Edinburgh
The Surgeons’ Hall Museums
On Nicolson Street, the Surgeons’ Hall Museums occupy the building of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. It is one of the oldest surgical colleges in the world, founded in 1505 that contains three distinct collections that together provide the most comprehensive account of the history of Scottish medicine available anywhere.
The Wohl Pathology Museum holds over 3,000 anatomical and pathological specimens, including materials related to the Burke and Hare murders. The History of Surgery Museum tells the story of the development of surgical knowledge in Scotland. The Dental Collection charts the equally gruesome history of dentistry from the pre-anaesthetic era onward.
The museum is free to enter and consistently cited as one of Edinburgh’s most worthwhile and most under-visited attractions. For those who found the Old Operating Theatre Museum in London compelling, Surgeons’ Hall is its Edinburgh equivalent and equal.
Credit: Tripadvisor
Jupiter Artland
Fifteen kilometres southwest of Edinburgh, on the estate of Bonnington House near Wilkieston, Jupiter Artland is one of the finest sculpture parks in Scotland. It’s a private collection of large-scale works by internationally significant artists set within the estate’s grounds and accessible to the public throughout the season.
Works by Anish Kapoor, Anthony Gormley, Charles Jencks, Phyllida Barlow, and dozens of others are placed across woodland, lawns, and purpose-built landscape features that were created specifically for the works. The experience of encountering Kapoor’s Suck or Gormley’s Land within the specific ecology of the Scottish estate grounds is genuinely different from encountering the same artists in a gallery, and the quality of the estate itself – a 19th-century building surrounded by gardens and woodland in a characteristically Scottish landscape – adds a context that urban art spaces cannot provide.
Jupiter Artland is open from May to September. The journey from Edinburgh takes approximately twenty minutes by car or by a combination of tram and bus.
Credit: Linwater Caravan Park
The Shore in Leith
The historic waterfront of Leith, Edinburgh’s port called the Shore is the most consistently rewarding area of Edinburgh for visitors who want to discover the city beyond the castle and the Royal Mile.
The Shore’s combination of repurposed warehouses, early 19th-century maritime buildings, and the Water of Leith at the final stretch before it meets the Firth of Forth creates a sense of place that is entirely distinct from the Old Town. Many of the restaurants are among Edinburgh’s finest, including The Kitchin and Restaurant Martin Wishart, both Michelin-starred. They are accessible by a fifteen-minute tram journey from the city centre.
The Sunday morning walking route along the Shore, past the old Customs House and down to the former docks at Ocean Terminal, gives the best account of what Leith actually is and was: a city with its own civic identity that Edinburgh absorbed rather than merely expanded into.
Credit: Leith Edinburgh
Practical Notes
The Edinburgh Underground Vaults require booking. Mercat Tours and Real Mary King’s Close are both reputable operators for underground Edinburgh experiences; both book out during the Festival and should be reserved several days in advance at other times.
Many of Edinburgh’s finest hidden gems are free. The Writers’ Museum, Greyfriars Kirkyard, the Surgeons’ Hall Museums, the Royal Botanic Garden (outdoor), Dunbar’s Close Garden, and the Dean Village walk all cost nothing.
The Water of Leith Walkway connects Dean Village, Stockbridge, Canonmills, and Leith on a continuous riverside walking route of approximately twelve kilometres. Walking any section of it reveals a city quite different from the tourist Edinburgh above.
Conclusion
Edinburgh’s hidden gems are not hidden in the sense of being inaccessible. They are hidden in the sense that the city is layered. That every famous thing it contains has something less famous immediately adjacent to it, and that the decision to look sideways rather than straight ahead is consistently rewarded.
The kirkyard is full of iron cages. The garden at the bottom of the fence. The village below the city. The geological masterpiece is below the volcano. The surgical museum, where the history of the body trade is told without apology.
Edinburgh is not hiding these things. It is simply not announcing them.
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