THE ROYAL MILE

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LADY STAIR'S CLOSE

When the Mound first opened at the end of the 18th century, the close was the most direct route from the Old Town to the New Town. A plaque on the entry to the close commemorates the visit of Dick Steele, the early 18th-century wit and writer for The Spectator, who stood a banquet for some impoverished locals in a tavern, where he declared that he had 'drunk enough of native drollery to compose a comedy'. Sadly no record remains of his having done so. Luckless Lady Stair Around the same time, the close was home to the beautiful but filthy-tongued Elizabeth, Lady Stair, who suffered badly at the hands of drunken men.

After jumping from a window to escape her murderous first husband, Lord Penrose (who then left the country), she learned of his attempted remarriage abroad by seeing in a tinker's mirror a vision of her brother attacking him at an altar. Her brother returned from overseas and confirmed the story.

When the Viscount died a few years later in I706, she vowed never to remarry, but was forced to save her reputation by marrying the Earl of Stair, who had contrived to appear half-naked at her prayer~window on the High Street. Only slightly less brutal than her first husband, the Earl thumped her hard enough to draw blood but then renounced any drink that was not offered him by her fair hand.

Lady Stair's House was heavily restored in the late I 9th century, and is now the Writers' Museum {open June-Sept Mon-Sat 10-6; Oct-MayMon-Sat 10-5; during the Festival also Sun 2-51, celebrating the lives and works of Scott, Stevenson and Burns.

Leave the courtyard by the entrance on the left-hand side, which takes you back on to the Lawnmarket opposite Brodie's Close.

In the late I770s Deacon Brodie was a respected town councillor. The O. J. Simpson of his day, no one could believe that someone quite so famous could be quite so criminal, and the way people still talk about him today, you might be forgiven for thinking he had been a murderer, not merely a thief. Something about his outer veneer of polished respectability and his inner delight in dodging the law has made him a local hero.

He was famously the model for Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde. Now you can have a respectable cup of tea in his old house and admire his expansive kitchen. Appropriately enough, a popular pub named after him now stands directly opposite the High Court of Justiciary, or criminal courts. There are several shops along this stretch of the Royal Mlle where you could buy a tartan souvenir, a woolly jumper to keep out the Edinburgh weather, or even a pair of made-to-measure hand-knitted tartan socks.

Carry on down the Royal Mile (crossing over Walk 11/, to the imposing statue of David Hume.

This very vague likeness, with its empty tablet and ironic classical pose, was commissioned by the Saltire Society and unveiled in 1997. Apparently the sculptor-Alexander Stoddart-originally proposed a Mount Rushmore-like sculpture carved out of Salisbury Crags. This prime positron is more appropriate to the philosopher's whole-hearted engagement with human affairs, for this is where the High Street begins.

Continue just beyond Hume, to Advocate's Close, on the left. This popular photo opportunity has narrow steepness giving on to wide views of the New Town below. Just next door are the offices of the Old Town Renewal Trust, with displays on the problems facing the conservation of the area. Cross the street to Parliament Square, set in solemn splendour around St Giles. Before going into the church, pause at the heartshaped set of stones in the pavement just beyond the statue of the 5th Duke of Buccleuch.

This is all that remains to mark the site of the 'Heart of Midlothian', Walter Scott's nickname for the old Tolbooth, the forbidding building that served as council chambers, police station and town jail for several hundred years before being demolished in 1817. These stones are now the only place in Edinburgh where you're allowed to spit; in fact it's meant to be positively lucky to do so.

The absence of the Tolbooth certainly affords plenty of room to appreciate the huge west front of the church, to which it was actually connected until 1632 when Charles I ordered 'an end to this profanation', giving the council cause to build Parliament House).

High Kirk of St Giles

Whether or not you find this massive edifice attractive, there's no denying its central place in the history of the capital, its country and its High Street. Supposedly constructed on the site of a chapel founded by monks from Lindisfarne in the 9th century, the huge building can be read as a miniature of the city as a whole, with its medieval tower standing proud above a smooth late Georgian facade. Plans are afoot to replace the gilded finials on its famous crown spire, missing since about 1800, which might go some way towards giving the grey old pile a bit of dazzle and glory. The cathedral got its name from the patron saint of cripples, lepers and nursing mothers, a hermit who survived in the wilderness thanks to his tame deer.

The building once housed a relic in the form of a piece of the saint's armbone, mounted in gold with a diamond ring on its finger, donated to the church in 1454 by Willlam Preston; at the east end of the Preston Aisle, just before the Thistle Chapel, the oldest known example of the Edinburgh coat of arms features St Giles' deer hind.

This was the medieval burgh's first parish church, begun around 1140. The only surviving evidence of its 12th-century origins is a single scallop capital, at what was once the north entrance to the nave on its northwest inside corner. The tower dates from the 14th and 15th centuries, and was capped with its distinctively Scottish crown spire in around 1486. But most of the present structure's blackened ashlar exterior was the work of William Burn in the 1830s.

The interior is another story: the four stone pillars supporting the tower are all that remains of the Norman church destroyed by Richard 11 of England in 1385, but much of the rest of the interior is 15th-century. During the Reformation, the most illustrious period in St Giles' history, John Knox preached here to over 3000 people, inveighing against the idolatory of St Giles; his statue stands forbiddingly by the front door. Later, one Jenny Geddes famously threw her stool at the preacher using Laud's liturgy, part of the attempt to impose the English prayer book, shouting 'roes the false loon dare say Mass at my lug"?' Still often known as St Giles' Cathedral, strictly speaking it hasn't been one since 1689, when the Church of Scotland did away with bishops.

The planned restoration work will include the notoriously gloomy interior. In the north aisle can be seen the tombs of the leaders of the bitter religious wars: Argyll, the famous Covenanter, and Montrose, the leader of the Royalists. Characters commemorated on the right hand side of the nave include Thomas Chalmers and Robert Fergusson, and there's a plaque reading 'Thank God for James Young Simpson's discovery of chloroform anaesthesia'.

Robert Lorimer's Thistle Chapel 11910) is also worth seeking out. The Order of the Thistle was created in the 15th century by James 111 and the chapel features fine stained glass by Douglas Strachan. Other stained glass to look out for is by the socialist arts and crafts artist William Morris and the pre-Raphaelite William Burnelones.

Underneath the cathedral is an unpretentious, reasonably priced Café where you can take shelter and tea in the company of women of a certain age and lawyers from over the road in Parliament House.

Cross Parliament Square to take a look inside Parliament House.