Princes Street Gardens

Edinburgh's most beautiful park sits on top of a lake of corpses. That's a slight exaggeration, but only slight. In 1460, King James III ordered the valley below the castle to be flooded, creating the Nor Loch as both a defensive moat and the city's primary water supply. Over the following three centuries, the loch became Edinburgh's unofficial dump: human waste, slaughterhouse offal, and reportedly the occasional murder victim were hurled into its waters. By the eighteenth century, the stench was unbearable and Edinburgh's growing upper classes demanded action.

Draining began in 1759 and continued in stages until 1820, supervised by engineer James Jardine. What emerged was a fetid swamp that gradually dried into the landscaped park we see today. The gardens opened in stages during the 1820s and were initially private, accessible only to residents of Princes Street who paid a key fee. They became fully public in the late nineteenth century.

The gardens are divided into East and West by The Mound — an artificial hill created from the earth excavated during construction of Edinburgh's New Town in the 1760s. Around two million cartloads of rubble were dumped here to create a link between the Old and New Towns. The Scottish National Gallery and the Royal Scottish Academy now sit on top of it, connected by an underground link called the Weston Link opened in 2004.

On a clear day, the West Gardens are one of the finest urban spaces in Europe: the castle soaring above, the Scott Monument piercing the sky, and the Victorian Ross Fountain — controversially purchased from the Great Exhibition of 1862 — glinting in whatever sunshine Edinburgh can spare. During the Christmas Market and Hogmanay celebrations, the gardens transform into a festival ground with a Ferris wheel, ice rink, and approximately seventy thousand people trying to take the same photograph.