Edinburgh Castle, 443 feet (135 metres) above sea level, dominates the city. Archaeological excavations have shown that the Castle Rock, previously thought to have first been fortified as a stronghold of the Gododdin in the 6th century, originated in the Bronze Age and has been occupied for some 3,000 years. Its first documented use as a royal castle dates from the reign of Malcolm III Canmore (1058–93), but successive phases of damage and reconstruction have been so extensive that little of substance before the reign of James IV (1488–1513) has survived. The small chapel of St. Margaret, queen of Malcolm Canmore, on the highest point of the rock, probably dates from the reign of her youngest son, David I (1124–53), and is the oldest surviving building.

The Royal Mile, which begins outside the Castle Esplanade, descends Castle Hill, the crest of rock linking the castle with the Palace of Holyroodhouse to the east. The Augustinian abbey of Holyrood and the royal burgh of Edinburgh, first mentioned in the period 1124–27, were both originally creations during the reign of David I. The Royal Mile bears several street names that are medieval in origin—Castle Hill, Lawnmarket (or “land market,” where the produce of the countryside was sold), High Street, and Canongate (reflecting the fact that Edinburgh was an abbot’s burgh and its superior was head of a religious house of Augustinian canons). The Old Town’s towering tenements press together along the crest. Because of its shortage of building space—only 140 acres (57 hectares)—the Old Town was compelled to expand skyward as its population increased sharply during the 16th and 17th centuries. It was only after 1600, however, that Edinburgh began to acquire its characteristic 6-, 10-, and even 12-story tenements. This upward expansion—symbolized by Gladstone’s Land, a six-story tenement in Lawnmarket that is now a museum—let very little light into the narrow passageways and gave the Old Town its herringbone settlement pattern. The cliff face of houses is broken by wynds (narrow, winding stone lanes leading down either side of the ridge) and closes or vennels (entryways into courtyards, around and behind which are yet more buildings).

A number of important buildings line the Royal Mile. At its heart is the cathedral of St. Giles (the High Kirk of Edinburgh) of the Church of Scotland. It has a fine late-Gothic nave and a magnificent 15th-century crown tower: an open spire with eight flying buttresses supporting a sculptured turret, aping the imperial crown that Scottish kings claimed to possess from the reign of James III (1460–88) onward. Sadly, much of the exterior stonework is a fairly crude 19th-century restoration.

Behind St. Giles, in Parliament Square, is Parliament House, built by the town council between 1632 and 1639. Parliament Square lies over the site of the medieval graveyard where John Knox, the most celebrated figure of the Scottish Reformation, was buried; thus, Knox has no marked grave or tombstone, save for a small plaque above one of the designated parking spaces between the church and Parliament House, which now houses the supreme civil and criminal law courts of Scotland. Although Parliament House is now one of the city’s finest buildings, its construction by Charles I was originally opposed by many in Edinburgh, which was forced to finance the enormous costs of its erection. The Scottish Parliament met there from 1639 to 1707. The Parliament House complex is adjacent to the National Library of Scotland, successor to the Advocates’ Library, founded in the 1680s; the philosopher David Hume was once its librarian.

Opposite St. Giles, slightly to the east, are the City Chambers. This building, completed in 1761 as the Royal Exchange but never used for that purpose, faces the Mercat Cross (Market Cross), the hub of the old city. Before James VI left Scotland and its capital to claim the throne of England as James I in 1603, the Mercat Cross was, in a very real sense, the centre of the kingdom of Scotland. In the 18th century it was a focal point of the Scottish Enlightenment, home of some of the world’s foremost economists and philosophers (e.g., Hume and William Robertson). Indeed, William Smellie, printer for the University of Edinburgh and editor of the first edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, the oldest English-language encyclopaedia, immortalized the Mercat Cross, noting a remark made by an English visitor at the height of the city’s reputation: “Here I stand at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, take fifty men of genius and learning by the hand.” Part of the original pillar of the cross was used in a late 19th-century reconstruction undertaken at the expense of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. Royal proclamations are announced from its tower platform by members of the Court of the Lord Lyon (the Scottish equivalent of the College of Heralds).

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Some 300 feet (90 metres) to the east of Mercat Cross was another symbol of the burgh’s status—the tron, or weighbeam, where all incoming goods were weighed. It was also the site of the Tron Kirk (built 1637–47), Edinburgh’s second post-Reformation church and now a tourist information centre, where the North and South bridges later cut across the crest of the ridge. Almost directly across from the kirk is Anchor Close, where Smellie printed the 1787 edition of the Poems of Robert Burns. Smellie introduced Burns to the conviviality of a club called the Crochallan Fencibles; the poet, in return, regaled them with the bawdy songs titled Merry Muses of Caledonia (first published in 1800).

Among the noteworthy buildings along the High Street and Canongate sections of the Royal Mile is John Knox House, which stands close to the Netherbow, the main gate of the royal burgh until the 18th century. Now a museum, the house provides a glimpse of an older Old Town (though its forestair probably dates from the 1550s, part of the house itself was originally built in the 15th century). Other notable buildings along this stretch of the Royal Mile are Moray House, a 17th-century town house now used as a teacher-training college; the Baroque-fronted Canongate Church (1688–90), whose graveyard contains the tombs of 18th-century poet Robert Fergusson and political economist Adam Smith; Acheson House (1633), containing the Scottish Craft Centre; Huntly House, containing the Civic Museum; and the old Canongate Tolbooth (1591). Queensberry House (1681), acquired by William Douglas, 1st duke of Queensberry, as a town house in 1686, served as a barracks and a hospital; closed in 1995, it was redeveloped and is now the focal point of the Scottish Parliament complex. The 17th-century inn in White Horse Close, once the terminus of the London coach, has been splendidly restored as a group of private homes.