THE NEW TOWN

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Calton Hill

The Burial Ground makes a good introduction to the monuments of Calton Hill itself. Here, on a much smaller scale, you are surrounded by an even greater profusion of commemorative stonework.

You can't miss the most interesting monument, the Martyrs' Memorial, the prominent obelisk erected in 1844 by the Complete Suffrage Association. Abraham Lincoln casts a sympathetic eye on the memorial from over the way on the Emancipation Monument, commemorating the Scottish-American dead of the American Civil War. Next to it is Robert Adam's great, round Roman mausoleum for the great, round sceptical philosopher David Hume. On his burial in 1776, his friends kept vigil for eight nights by the gloomy tomb, some said to prevent the devil coming for his atheist soul, more likely to prevent medical students coming for his valuable corpse.

Other famous individuals whose graves can be found here include David Allan, the historical genre painter, and Thomas Hamilton, the architect of the Martyrs' Memorial, of the Royal High School (see below) and of much of the city's neoclassical appearance.

Continue up Waterloo Place as it turns into Regent Road as far as the rather depressing authoritarian bulk of St Andrew's House on the right hand side.

Standing on the site of old Calton Jail, St Andrew's House was modelled on the United Nations building in Geneva. It was opened as the new Scottish Office on the day Britain declared war in 1939 and still houses some of its departments.

Continue round the corner to take in the enormous expanse of Thomas Hamilton's Royal High School.

This much more pleasing building was very nearly the seat of Scotland's own parliament; the colonnaded facade of its stately old portico looks past Hamilton's monument to Robert Burns down to the much larger purpose-built parliament building under construction in Holyrood Road.

Hamilton's school building is the most complete contribution to the Greek Revival in Edinburgh. Work started on it in 1825 as the new home for the city's oldest school (since 1519), whose old pupils included Walter Scott and at least three future Lord Chancellors of England. In 1968 the school moved out to the genteel northwestern suburb of Barnton and is now one of the city's better state comprehensives. The building now stands empty as people debate various schemes which might best be housed in it.

The collection of buildings here on the hill explain why Edinburgh was given the title 'The Athens of the North'. The democratic pile of the school is something like the Temple of Theseus; the Burns monument opposite imitates the choragic monument to Lysicrates; up on the hill behind, the City Observatory is based on the Temple of the Winds, standing next to the final touch, a bit of the Parthenon itself in the shape of the unfinished National Monument (see below).

Branch off left into Regent Terrace.

This smart row of terraced houses, with private gardens sloping down to the right, is the home of foreign consulates and private art galleries. As it rounds the bend of the hill it turns into the elegant curve of Carlton Terrace (with an 'r'), named in the 19th century after the Prince Regent's London home, Carlton House, at the time of his visit to Edinburgh.

At the end of Carlton Terrace turn left into Royal Terrace.

This is the grandest and most spectacularly positioned residential street in the city. The simple form of Greenside Church, with its square steeple topped with four tall pyramids, beckons you from the end of the street.

Turn left at the end behind the church and climb the steep sloped steps to reach the top of Calton Hill for one of the finest views to be had of the city-with the Forth Road and Rail Bridges away in the distance.

The root of the name Calton (without the 'r') is less august than this prominent landmark deserves, being prosaically derived from the old Gallic word for a hill with scrubby bushes on top, where people used to hang out their washing to dry. The apparently random collection of monuments you now see competing for significance at the top of Calton Hill had been assembled by the end of the 19th century. Looking west towards the castle and Princes Street, the Gothic style of the battlemented Old Observatory House was designed to complement the Old Calton Jail down the hill. Built for the optician and astronomer Thomas Short between 1776 and 1792, it is, surprisingly enough, almost the only surviving work of James Craig, the planner of the New Town.

The next building to go up, in no uncertain terms, was the Nelson Monument (open April-Oct Mon 1-6, Tues-Sat 10-0; Oct-Mar Mon-Sat 10-3; adm), the 106ft signal tower erected in memory of Admiral Horatio Nelson after his death at Trafalgar in 1805. Every year on the anniversary, October 21, its flags still fly the signal 'England expects that every man will do his duty.' The foundation stone was laid two years later in great secrecy because the authorities feared a crowd of his admirers might fall off the cliff.

A climb to the top of the steep, narrow staircase is bracingly rewarding, and if the wind is strong, admiring the view over the low parapet can be quite hair raising. The 'time-ball' on the mast drops at 1pm every weekday, in conjunction with the One O'clock Gun fired from the castle. It was set up in 1852 for the benefit of skippers on the Firth of Forth and used to be linked to the castle by the longest telegraph wire in the world.

The rest of the buildings on the hill were nearly all designed by the tireless William Playfair. First came the domed City Observatory, next to the Old Observatory, built in 1818 to provide accurate time-readings. Inside is the two faced 'Politician's Clock'.

Another dome was added much later and is now home to the Edinburgh Experience (open April-June, Sept and Oct Mon-Fri 2-5, Sat and Sun 10.30-5; July and August daily 10.30-5; adm). Every half-hour this presents a surprisingly effective 3-D panoramic tour of the city and its surroundings in their different seasonal colours. At the southeast corner of the hill Playfair then placed the Doric Monument to his uncle John, the president of the Astronomical Institution that had awarded him the contract in the first place.

Astronomical is the only word to describe the cost of the next scheme proposed by Scott, Cockburn and Lord Elgin (the one with the Marbles) among others: a replica of the Parthenon to commemorate the fallen of the Napoleonic Wars. The National Monument was started in 1826 but ran out of funds three years later. Something of an embarrassment to the city (known as 'Edinburgh's Folly'), it inspired various early 20th-century schemes to complete it: as a National Gallery, as a celebration of 200 years of the Union, or even as part of yet another new parliament building. All came to nothing. Now the great blocks beneath its 12 Doric columns provide a very solid viewpoint, regularly mobbed at events like the Festival fireworks.

Playfair's finishing touch on Calton Hill was his spectacularly positioned circular monument to Dugald Stewart, the professor of moral philosophy, a more exact copy of the Lysicrates monument, put up only a year after Hamilton's one for Burns down below. If it looks familiar, it may be because television journalists seem fond of choosing it as the ideal backdrop for their reports on the latest hot developments from the Scottish political scene.

To get down to the bottom of the hill, take the path to the left of the monument, enjoying the fine view down Princes Street. Go down the steps to the left and, just before you get to the bottom, look out for the unusual memorial to Saint Wolodymyr the Great, Ruler of Ukraine, hidden in the ivy. Turn right on to Regent Road and walk back down Waterloo Place to the Register House.

Before the Battle of Waterloo had ever happened, the area in front of Register House was Shakespeare Square, famous for its Theatre Royal, where the most celebrated actress of the day, Sarah Siddons, appeared in 1784. Nothing daunted by her initial failure to draw the expected applause, she continued with her performance. In one of the silences that followed a voice was heard to murmur 'that's no' bad!', which provoked a thunderous ovation. Walter Scott's dramatised version of 'Rob Roy' was another highlight which saved the theatre's by then ailing fortunes, but it was a short reprieve.

In 1859 it was demolished to make way for the new General Post Office, the large Italianate building now standing empty on the North Bridge opposite the Balmoral. Prince Albert laid the foundation stone in 1861. There are plans afoot to convert this enormous building into a five-star hotel, but the familiar facade of the much-loved East End landmark will thankfully be saved.

Pass Register House on your right, heading west, and turn right into a narrow alley called West Register Street.

On the right is New Register House (for records of births, marriages and deaths), and the Court of the Lord Lyon, final arbiter on all matters heraldic and genealogical. On the left, the Guildford Arms is an excellent real ale pub with a late 19th-century ribbed ceiling, next door to the famous Café Royal with its long island bar, green leather benches and antique tiled walls depicting industrial pioneers.

If you are doing this walk during bank opening hours continue straight on, down a paved alley called Gabriel's Road (keeping New Register House on your right), turn left through a narrow gate and you will emerge into the front courtyard of the Royal Bank of Scotland in St Andrew Square. If the bank is closed, follow West Register Street round into St Andrew Square and tuft right until you are standing in front of the bank.

St Andrew Square

Little of the original character of the first square to be built in Craig's New Town remains, although the houses along the north side give a rough idea of what it all would have looked like. The rest of the square has been largely swallowed up in grandiose financial institutions. However, the exterior of the elegant Palladian country house which is now the Royal Bank of Scotland's headquarters would still just about be recognisable to its 18th-century owner, Sir Laurence Dundas, Commissary-General in the British Army. In 1774 he pipped the City council to the post by buying this site before they could build St Andrew's Church here (forcing the church to be built on George Street, see below). Inside, the building has been much altered, but it's worth going in to see the starry 19th-century dome in the telling room. The reckless Sir Laurence later lost the house one night in a bet, but, rather than move out, built his creditor another house in Drummond Place.

The 150ft column in the middle of the square dominates its surroundings as surely as the man on top held the reins of power in late 18th-century Scotland. This was Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville, dubbed 'Harry IX, uncrowned King of Scotland' and described by Cockburn as 'the absolute dictator of Scotland'. He was Prime Minister William Pitt's right-hand man, keeping rigorous control over the voting of peers into Westminster, and wielding the kind of power that was only finally done away with by the 19th-century reform acts. The column, modelled on Trajan's in Rome, was put up in 1823, some two decades before Nelson's in London.

The six elongated figures on top of the Bank of Scotland, next door to its rival, represent Navigation, Commerce, Manufacture, Art, Science and Agriculture, the interests at the time of the British Linen Bank, who commissioned the building in 1846. Heading clockwise round the square, past another antique tiled bar called Tiles, you will find a plaque on the wall at No.21, in South St David Street, which marks the place where David Hume's new house once stood. One of the first to move into the New Town, the mild-mannered philosopher is supposed to have taken it in good part when the daughter of a judge graffitied his wall with 'St David'. He replied that many a worse man had been canonised, and the name has stuck for the street. It's ironic that this house was later where the first meetings of the Bible Society of Scotland were held.

Walk around St Andrew Square and continue west down George Street.