3 Days in Edinburgh, Built Around the One Thing Maps Hide: the Hill

Nearest station: 15 min uphill walk from Waverley

Open from 9:30, and worth being there for it. Adult admission is £23.50 booked online against £26.00 at the gate, so book even though it is not compulsory: the castle's own site warns that tickets often sell out well ahead in summer. Allow two to three hours for the Crown Jewels, the Stone of Destiny and St Margaret's Chapel, the oldest building in the city. From Waverley it is about fifteen minutes up, and it is genuinely up.

The catch: During the Military Tattoo the castle closes early, at 5pm with last entry 3:30pm, on several August dates. Check before building an afternoon around it.

Walk down. The Mile is four connected streets from Castlehill to the Canongate, and the interest is in the closes running off it, narrow stepped alleys dropping down the side of the ridge. Duck into Riddle's Court, Advocate's Close and Dunbar's Close Garden, which almost nobody finds. Eat off the Mile rather than on it; the parallel streets are better and cheaper.

A guided hour through the sealed 17th-century closes buried beneath the Royal Mile when the City Chambers were built on top of them. Adult tickets run £25.00 for the Essential tour and £28.50 for the Standard, and children under five are not admitted at all for safety reasons. It is the best account in the city of how ordinary people actually lived on this ridge.

The catch: It is timed, guided and underground, with no scope to linger or leave early. If you dislike enclosed spaces, skip it rather than test it.

The King's official residence in Scotland, at the bottom of the Mile, with the ruined abbey beside it and Mary Queen of Scots' chambers upstairs. Adult admission is £22.00. The critical detail is the calendar: it closes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for most of the year and only opens seven days a week in July, August and September, so a midweek visit outside those months needs checking first.

The catch: It closes to visitors entirely when the royal household is in residence, usually a fortnight in late June or early July. That is announced in advance but catches people out.

Free, open daily from 10:00, and sitting on the Mound between the two towns. It holds Titian, Vermeer, Velazquez and the best collection of Scottish painting anywhere, and it is small enough to do properly in ninety minutes. In August it stays open until 18:00 and on Thursdays until 19:00.

The Gothic rocket on Princes Street, 61 metres tall, built for Walter Scott. You can climb the narrowing spiral to the top for a view straight down the ridge. Tickets are sold only at the kiosk on the day, never online, and it closes for lunch between roughly 12:30 and 13:45, so time it. Sources disagree on the step count, with the official listing saying 221 and most others 287; either way the last stage is very tight.

The catch: The upper flights are genuinely narrow and two-way. Anyone broad-shouldered or claustrophobic should stop at the second gallery, which has most of the view anyway.

Ten minutes from Princes Street the city drops into the wooded gorge of the Water of Leith, and Dean Village at the bottom is a former milling hamlet of pantiled roofs and a mill lade, looking like a different century. The walkway through it is free and runs 13 miles in total from Balerno to Leith. This is the single most surprising twenty minutes in Edinburgh.

Follow the Water of Leith downstream and the path delivers you into Stockbridge, which is the most pleasant neighbourhood in the city and knows it: independent shops, second-hand books, good bakeries and a Sunday market. Walk back up into the New Town for dinner, or stay down here and eat where the locals do.

The catch: Stockbridge sits below the New Town, so whatever you do the return is a climb. Budget the legs.

The summit is 251 metres and sits about 1.6 km east of the castle inside Holyrood Park, and it is free. Go early for the light and the space. Most routes are a round trip of roughly three to five kilometres taking one to two hours, though no official figure is published, and the ground is rough rather than paved near the top. One thing to check before you go: the Radical Road path below Salisbury Crags has been closed since 2018 after rockfalls, so routes that use it are out of date.

The catch: It is exposed on all sides and the weather changes fast. In wind or wet it is genuinely unpleasant and the last section is slippery; save it for a clear morning and swap in the museum if the forecast is bad.

A much smaller climb at the east end of Princes Street, and the source of nearly every photograph of the city, because it is the one hill with both the Old Town skyline and the castle in the same frame. The unfinished National Monument on top, twelve columns of an intended Parthenon, was abandoned when the money ran out. Free, and ten minutes up.

Free, open daily 10:00 to 17:00, and the best wet-weather insurance in the city. The Grand Gallery is a Victorian iron and glass hall, Dolly the sheep is upstairs, and the Scottish history galleries in the newer wing run from prehistory to the present. The roof terrace has a view most visitors never find.

Nearest station: Tram or bus to Ocean Terminal

Down at Leith, the ship the Royal Family used for forty-four years, kept as it was with the state apartments, the engine room and the crew's quarters open. Adult admission is £23 booked online against £25 on the door, and children up to fifteen go free between 25 June and 1 September. Last entry is 16:00 from April to October, so this is the one stop today with a hard deadline.

The catch: It sits inside a shopping centre, which is an odd approach to a royal yacht. On several August dates last entry moves forward to 15:00, so check if you are visiting during the festivals.