THE ROYAL MILE

THE PALACE OF HOLYROODHOUSE

Open daily April-Oct 9.30-6; Nov-Mar 9.30-4.30; last admission three-quarters of an hour before closing; guided tour only; adm. Garden open summer only; special exhibitions in winter.

More colloquially known as Holyrood Palace, this is the building that more than any other makes the mile royal. First opened to the public in the summer of 1909, It's still the official residence of the Queen in Scotland (it is surprisingly small), although the royal family tends to spend much more time at Balmoral in the Highlands. It has been suggested that the Princess Royal, a keen Scottish rugby supporter, might make more use of the palace in the future.

Approaching the main entrance, past the I9th-century fountain modelled on Linlithgow Palace's, the battered stonework of the left-hand tower with the conical turrets looks much older than the one on the right, and indeed it is, being the famous apartments of Mary, Queen of Scots, built by her father James V in I 535.

He also began the west front with its heraldic decoration, but the righthand tower didn't go up until more than a century later, in the reign of Charles 11.

The Queen's ante-chamber and bedchamber are the climax of the short guided tour round the palace but the route takes you through some splendid Carolean rooms on the way. The great stair has an extraordinary baroque plaster ceiling, with ring upon ring of delicately modelled flowers and foliage supported by four angels waving the symbols of monarchy. It's a sumptuous prelude to Queen Victoria's dining room, relatively modest in its neoclassicism and still used by Queen Elizabeth 11, and then the throne room, where George IV was presented with the Scottish crown. These rooms are followed by five that are still decorated much as they would have been In the time of Charles 11, leading to his bedroom, where the ceiling depicts the 'Apotheosis of Hercules' complete with the King's favourite pet spaniels.

Linking the two towers is the Great Gallery, lined with a bizarre array of portraits of Scottish monarchs down the ages, every single one featuring the notable nose of Charles 11. The collection was commissioned by Charles to reinforce the monarchy's divine right to rule after the War of the Three Kingdoms of the 1640s, and it was turned out at a phenomenal rate, about a painting a week, over two years by the Dutchman Jacob de Witt. Each painting is carefully named and dated, and the overall effect still asserts a powerful sense of unbroken tradition.

The portraits would have looked down on the splendid scenes at the Palace when Bonnie Prince Charlie briefly brought life to the place again for five weeks after his victory at Prestonpans in I 745. Reproached for his lack of attention to the ladies, he pointed to his Highland soldiers and said, 'These are my beauties!' Not much later many of them were lying dead at Culloden.

After the gallery, at the end of the tour, it's his great great~grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, that everyone tries to picture in her tiny anteroom, shielding her favourite David Raze in vain from her drunken husband's murderous intentions. The two rooms in the top of the tower have been a shrine to the cult of Queen Mary for the last two hundred years at least, making them probably the most visited place in Edinburgh. Inevitably it's disappointing to discover that the bed and much of the furniture is not original, but thankfully any trace of the blood from Rise's fifty-one stabwounds disappeared long ago. Although the famous stain was just a remarkably successful piece of 18th-century tourist hype, the rooms make it easy to imagine the young Frenchwoman's dark days and long nights in these poky apartments. Or to remember her son running down the stairs in his underwear to receive the news, brought to him by a man who had covered 400 miles on horseback in two and a half days, that he was King of England as well as Scotland.

After the tour, you can look around the ruins of Holyrood Abbey, which is much older than the palace, although only a tiny part of the church founded by David I in 1128 survives. It's difficult to visualise today just how grand the abbey would have been in the Middle Ages.

The story goes that David I founded it after falling from his horse when it reared up upon being confronted by an angry stag. The king looked up from the ground and saw a shining cross between the stag's antlers, and he vowed there and then to found a chapel on the spot. The abbey was used for the coronation of the doomed King Charles I in 1633.

To see the door of the original church turn right as you come in from the palace, walk to the end and it's on the right.

This door leads into the roofless nave from the cloisters, and there is also an excellent view of it from the gardens.

Leaving the palace complex, turn down Horse Wynd and at the bottom tUM right into Holyrood Road

Holyrood Road is currently in the throes of the 'Holyrood Project' which will turn a notoriously drab thoroughfare into a thriving centre of Scottish affairs. Currently stealing the show is the great tent-like structure of Edinburgh's brand new visitor attraction, Our Dynamic Earth, a sensational interactive tour through 4500 million years of the earth's geological and natural history.

It will soon be upstaged, however, by the new Scottish parliament building next door, at the heart of the road's transformation. Designed by Enric and Benedetta Miralles from Barcelona, a complex of buildings is springing up on the site of the old Scottish and Newcastle Brewery. The new parliament will deliberately avoid appearing as a pompous palace of power; it actually promises to look something like a group of upturned boats. The Scotsman newspaper is also in the process of having a vast headquarters built for itself on Holyrood Road, and the street will undergo extensive landscaping, with new hotels, parks and pedestrian areas.

Alternatively leave the palace, and enter Holyrood Park via the coachhouse exit, tufting left at the end past the car park

Holyrood Park and Arthur's Seat

This is the ideal place to escape the hugger-mugger of the Old Town and get clean away from the crowds: Holyrood Park and Arthur's Seat are without doubt one of the very best things about Edinburgh. Few other cities can boast their own miniature Highland mountain for their recreation nor their very own extinct volcano. The profile of Arthur's Seat seen from the west has been aptly compared to a crouching lion, and, however easy the ascent of it may look, the Scottish weather can easily turn a harmless ramble up its flanks into a terrible ordeal.

The climb to the top of Arthur's Seat is rewarded by a magnificent 360-degree view of the city, with the sea to the north and east and the lovely Pentland Hills to the west. If you are in a car follow the three-mile tarmac road, the Queen's Drive {closed to traffic on Sundays, which circles the hill;you can park at its highest point by Dunsapie Loch and make the 20-minute walk from there straight up the smooth grassy slope to the summit. On foot from Holyrood Palace, walk clockwise awat from the palace car park, past the 'no entry to traffic' sign, and up the wide footpath past St Margaret's Well to the ruins of St Anthony's Chapel. Rest here and enjoy the fine views of St Margaret's Loch below, always teeming with birdlife.

The park was first properly enclosed by James V and named after his palace beside it. Mystery surrounds the origin of the name Arthur's Seat. In the earliest records it's just called 'the Crag' and it has been suggested that the romantic name may be a corruption either of the Gaelic Ard-na-Said, meaning 'height of arrows', referring to the dark age hill fort and hunting grounds, or of Ard Thor, meaning the height of the thunderer'.

It's been a very long time indeed since the hill really did thunder, as an active volcano 350 million years ago when Scotland was on the Equator. The most obvious of the park's geological features is the long line of ruddy cliff called Salisbury Crags, formed by a great layer of solidified lava or basalt resting on sandstone.

At sunset they sometimes look as though they're made of solid gold. It was at the southern end of these crags that James Hutton developed his 'Theory of the Earth' in 1788 and helped lay the foundations of modern geology.

At the bottom of Salisbury Crags runs the Radical Road, built at Walter Scott's instigation by a group of unemployed weavers from the west of Scotland. If you haven't already been enlightened by Our Dynamic Earth, the rocks in the park are best explored with the help of an excellent illustrated guide called Discovering Edinburgh's Volcano, published by the Edinburgh Geological Society (available in all good bookshops priced £1), pointing out where to find the likes of intrusions, downthrows, flow lines and craters.

To digest all that history and geology you'll probably need to sit down and have a cup of tea, if not something stronger. There are plenty of places to choose from at the bottom of the Royal Mile, or you're heading down from the top of Arthur's Seat it might make more sense to head for the Old Town instead.