Scotland Guide
Edinburgh
Holyrood Park
Holyrood Park – or Queen's Park – a natural wilderness in the very heart of the modern city, is unquestionably one of Edinburgh's greatest assets. Packed into an area no more than five miles in diameter is an amazing variety of landscapes – hills, crags, moorland, marshes, glens, lochs and fields – representing something of a microcosm of Scotland's scenery.
Two of the most rewarding walks begin from just outside the palace grounds: one, along a pathway nicknamed the "Radical Road", traverses the ridge immediately below the Salisbury Crags, one of the main features of the Edinburgh skyline. This is arguably a finer walk than the sharper climb to the top of Arthur's Seat. For a looped walk of about an hour's duration from Holyrood follow the "Volunteer's Walk" up the glen behind the Crags, then return along the Radical Road.
The usual starting point for the ascent of Arthur's Seat, which at 823ft above sea level easily towers over all of Edinburgh's numerous high points, is Dunsapie Loch, reached by following the tarred Queen's Drive in a clockwise direction from the palace gates. Part of a volcano which last saw action 350 million years ago, its connections to the legendary Celtic king are fairly sketchy: the name is likely to be a corruption of the Gaelic Ard-na-said, or "height of arrows". From Dunsapie Loch it's a twenty-minute climb up grassy slopes to the rocky summit. On a clear day, the views might just stretch to the English border and the Atlantic Ocean; but you're more likely to see Fife, a few Highland peaks and, of course, Edinburgh laid out on all sides.