Royal Mile

This street isn't actually a mile long — it's a mile and 107 yards, which happens to be exactly one Scots mile, a measurement that hasn't been used since the eighteenth century. Running downhill from the castle to the palace, the Royal Mile drops over 60 metres across six distinct sections: the Castle Esplanade, Castlehill, the Lawnmarket, the High Street, the Canongate, and Abbey Strand. Each name tells a story of what happened there — the Lawnmarket was where linen ("lawn") was traded, the Canongate was the road of the Augustinian canons from Holyrood.

By 1645, as many as 70,000 people were crammed along this single spine, living in tenements that climbed to fourteen storeys — the skyscrapers of the medieval world. With up to ten people sharing a single room and three hundred in a single block, residents emptied chamber pots from upper windows with the warning cry "Gardyloo!" — a corruption of the French "gardez l'eau." The stench was so notorious that Edinburgh earned its nickname "Auld Reekie" from the perpetual haze of smoke and worse hanging over the Old Town.

Branching off the main road are over ninety surviving "closes" — narrow alleyways that were once locked at night with iron gates. Each close was a self-contained community named after its most prominent resident or trade: Lady Stair's Close, Advocate's Close, Bakehouse Close. At their peak, around 250 of these lanes threaded through the city. The Great Fire of 1824 destroyed much of the eastern Old Town, and Victorian "improvements" cleared many more, but the closes that survive are time capsules of medieval urban life.

The Royal Mile was first referred to as "Via Regis" — the Way of the King — as early as the twelfth century, when David I laid out the High Street and granted trading rights to the township. It has been the stage for coronation processions, riots, executions, and every August, the world's largest arts festival.