Edinburgh Old Town Literary Walking Tour: Where Books were Born

Edinburgh’s Old Town is a city of stone stacked with stories, its closes and wynds once home to more literary giants per square mile than anywhere else in Scotland. On this walking tour, you’ll hear how witch trials and grave robbers inspired some of Scotland’s most enduring fiction. You’ll also find where Robert Burns lodged below a brothel, and hear about the friendship between dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell.

The tour starts at the Witches’ Well on Castlehill, where James VI’s obsession with witchcraft helped inspire Shakespeare’s Macbeth. You’ll then wind down past Ramsay Garden, home to poet Allan Ramsay, and along the Lawnmarket to James Court, where philosopher David Hume once lived. You’ll pass the Writers’ Museum, dedicated to Burns, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, and hear how a cabinet made by Deacon Brodie, a respected craftsman who burgled by night, may have inspired Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Along Canongate, you’ll find the Masonic lodge where Burns is said to have been made Poet Laureate, and Moray House, where JK Rowling trained as a teacher while working on Harry Potter. You’ll also visit Canongate Kirkyard, where Burns paid for a headstone on the unmarked grave of fellow poet Robert Fergusson. The tour ends at Dunbar’s Close Garden, near Panmure House, the final home of economist Adam Smith.

On this 90-minute tour, you’ll have a chance to:

• Pause at the Heart of Midlothian, the old Tolbooth prison and execution site that gave Scott’s novel its name
• Stand at the entrance to Mary King’s Close, the underground street that inspired Ian Rankin’s Rebus novel Mortal Causes
• See Chessel’s Court, where a failed robbery sealed Deacon Brodie’s fate
• Learn how Mary Queen of Scots left more than 30 surviving poems, nearly all in French
• Find the grave of Agnes Maclehose, the muse behind Burns’s love song Ae Fond Kiss
• Hear the legend of a misread gravestone that supposedly gave Charles Dickens the name Ebenezer Scrooge

By the end, you’ll understand why Edinburgh earned its reputation as a city built on words.