St Giles' Cathedral

In 1637, a market trader named Jenny Geddes supposedly hurled a wooden stool at the minister's head when he tried to read from the new Anglican prayer book that Charles I was forcing on the Scottish Kirk. Whether Jenny was real or a convenient folk legend, the riot that erupted in St Giles' that July day set off a chain of events — the National Covenant, the Bishops' Wars, and ultimately the Wars of the Three Kingdoms that would cost Charles his head. A stool in the cathedral gift shop claims to be hers.

The crown steeple is the cathedral's glory — an open imperial crown of stone arches dating to between 1460 and 1467, one of only two surviving medieval crown steeples in Scotland. Eight stone buttresses spring from the tower, four from the corners and four from the centre of each side, creating a structure so distinctive it became Edinburgh's unofficial emblem. John Mylne the Younger repaired it in 1648 and added the decorative pinnacles halfway up the crests that give it its lace-like silhouette.

John Knox, the thundering voice of the Scottish Reformation, served as minister here from 1559 and essentially ran the city from this pulpit. The building has been called "the Mother Church of World Presbyterianism" ever since. Before Knox, Richard II of England burned it in 1385. After Knox, it was partitioned into four separate churches, used as a prison, a police station, and even a storehouse for the town's guillotine — Edinburgh's version of the French device, called "The Maiden," which claimed around 150 heads between its first use in 1564 and retirement in 1710.

The Thistle Chapel, added in 1911, is one of the finest examples of Gothic Revival in Britain. Every surface is carved — angels, animals, and a bagpipe-playing angel who was the stonemason's private joke. The chapel seats only sixteen members of the Order of the Thistle, Scotland's highest chivalric order.