I’ve been there many times. It’s a wonderful place in the middle of our city.

The Queen’s Park, now called Holyrood Park, is the great park in central Edinburgh. It comprises 650 acres (260Ha), or just over 1 square mile of parkland for everyone to enjoy. It’s smaller than New York City’s Central Park, bigger than London’s Regent’s Park and is the only one with a huge extinct volcano.

The Queen’s Park

The Queen’s Park is a free to enter park (although you need to pay for parking – there is a small car park near the Holyrood Palace entrance). And what a wonderful park it is.

The first thing you’ll notice when you enter the park at any one of its five entrances is, of course, the huge hill in front of you. The hill is called Arthur’s Seat and is an extinct volcano. You can read more about Arthur’s Seat in our blog post.

The park is entirely surrounded by the city but because of its size you can quickly escape the hustle and bustle of the city and find some solitude as you walk or climb. Because the park has never been lived on or developed (with the exception of the work carried out by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert) you will find wild areas like lochs, glens, cliffs, gorse and grass land.

The hill, Arthur’s Seat, offers amazing views over the city. At 825 feet (251m)  it is the highest point in Edinburgh and you can climb it in around an hour. The common track to the top starts as a paved path but near the top the tarmac track eventually peters out and you’ll be walking on the grass as you climb to the top.

As you climb you’ll get some wonderful views, even if you can’t make it to the top. To the north you will see the city as it stretches out to touch the sparkling waters of the River Forth. To the north-west you’ll get a view in the distance of the three great bridges that carry roads and the railway across the river to Fife.

Looking to the east,  you will see all the way down the firth of Forth to East Lothian and the North Sea. Look for two hills rising out of the flat landscape. The one to the right, inland, is Traprain Law, the one to the left, near the sea, is Berwick Law and the town beside it is North Berwick.

Looking south, because the area slopes away from the hill, on a clear day you can almost see the English border, some 50 miles (80km) distant.

Saint Anthony’s Chapel

As you enter the park from the Holyrood Palace entrance and look up toward Arthur’s Seat, you will see a ruined building standing on a small rocky spur on the side of hill. It is the ruin of the 15th century chapel of St Anthony.

The chapel with an adjacent Hermitage is thought to have been built sometime early in the 15th century. It is mentioned in a document issued by Pope Martin V in 1426, apparently giving a donation for some repairs.

There are two schools of thought as to why it’s named after St Anthony. It could be because linked to the Preceptory of St. Anthony, a skin hospice, which was based in Leith around this time and treated people for Erysipelas, a terrible disease of the skin, which killed tens of thousands of people in the middle ages.

The disease is also known as St Anthony’s Fire because people prayed to the saint to help cure them of the disease.

Or it could be that the chapel was simply dedicated to  St Anthony, also known as Anthony the Great. Anthony, born in Egypt around 251, is known as the Father of All Monks.

The building was originally rectangular in shape, around 43 ft long by 18 ft wide (13m by 5.5 m), with the tower standing around 40 ft  (12m) high, and probably had a spiral stair inside. 

The Hermitage was likely a storehouse. There’s not much left of it now – only a gable (end) wall. Francis Grose, in his The Antiquities of Scotland claimed it contained ‘a book, an hour-glass, and a lamp, which, with a mat for abed, made the general furniture of a hermitage’. Grose however, cites no evidence for this collection.

Several graves were discovered on the north side of the chapel during the course of some repairs to the chapel last century. These were less than a foot below the surface, and they were probably casual interments. Nothing was found except for a piece of 16th century pottery.

Finally, the Chapel was built on the site of a spring, called St Anthony’s Well. Sadly, water hasn’t flowed since the 1950s but it’s certainly worth viewing if only to see the massive capping stone above the well. Why it’s there is unclear. it could be to protect the well but to carry such a huge stone up the hillside for well seems excessive. Is it a pre-Christian stone?

Getting to the Queen’s Park

Getting to such a huge park in the middle of Edinburgh is easy of course. As with most of Edinburgh you can take the bus, walk or cycle. And, as there is a road (the Queen’s Drive) that runs through Holyrood Park, you can drive too.

Perhaps the nicest way to get to the park is on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Edinburgh Bus Tours and Bright Bus Tours both run services into the park, with the hop-off stop outside Dynamic Earth.

Cycle to Queen’s Park then ride around the wonderful Queen’s Drive that takes you right around the Queen’s Park. If you don’t have a bike, hire a bike at any Just Eat cycle stations around the city and if you want to get the bus back, you can leave your hire cycle at the Dynamic Earth cycle station.

There is a car park just inside the park at the Holyrood Park entrance and there is a second car park at Dunsapie Loch, although this car park is often closed.

Or, of course, you can walk. If you’re walking around the Old Town, just head down to the bottom of the Royal Mile to Holyrood Palace and the Scottish Parliament to find the main entrance to the Queen’s Park.

Prince Albert’s Reconstruction Of The Queen’s Park

Aside from quarrying stone from the massive Salisbury Crags, the park remained unchanged since the days of King James V, who built a wall (now gone) around the park. But when Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert started to stay in Holyrood Palace on their visits to Edinburgh, things changed.

Prince Albert, always a practical prince, took it upon himself to create a road through and around the park. Originally called Victoria Road and now called the Queen’s Drive, the road offers terrific views for cyclists and walkers.

The road links all four road entrances to the park. Cars and buses are allowed on the road but commercial vehicles are prohibited.

As well as building the road, Albert drained much of the boggy flat land surrounding Arthur’s Seat by creating two of the Queen’s Park lochs: St Margaret’s Loch and Dunsapie Loch. If you’re lucky you might see the otter that lives around Dunsapie Loch.

Dunsapie Loch is on the south side of the park, on the other side of the hill from Holyrood Palace. It can easily be reached by walking or cycling around the Queen’s Drive as the road tracks by the loch.

As well as the otter, the loch supports many bird species.

St Margaret’s Loch is the small loch beside the main, and at times busy thoroughfare of the Queen’s Drive as it starts at Holyrood Palace and heads east toward Meadowbank.

Like Dunsapie Loch, St Margaret’s supports many bird species including many swans.

Albert didn’t confine himself to just draining the park’s marshes and building roads. He also built the ‘castle’ wall that runs around what is now Dynamic Earth.

When Victoria and Albert stayed at Holyrood in the latter decades of the 19th century, the area around Holyrood Park was very different to what it is today. It was quite industrial – as far as the city of Edinburgh was ever industrial – and the chief industry at Holyrood was brewing beer!

In the late 19th century, there were around 29 breweries to be found at Holyrood, around where Dynamic East stands today and stretching up Holyrood Road.

Now, Queen Victoria really didn’t like the view of the breweries when she stayed at Holyrood Palace, so Albert, ever eager to please his wife, simply built a wall around the offending breweries and made it look like a castle wall.

He would even have servants dress as soldiers and march up and down the wall when the couple stayed at the palace to complete the illusion.

The wall is still there and now forms part of Dynamic Earth.

Ownership – Who Owns The Queen’s Park?

The answer to that question might seem obvious. Surely it’s the queen that owns the Queen’s Park? Well, that was true until the year before the millennium.

Until then, the park was indeed owned by the monarch. If a queen was on the throne, it was owned by the queen and was called the Queen’s Park. And if a king ruled, it was called the King’s Park. So when Queen Elizabeth became queen in 1952, the park changed from being called the King’s Park, after her father, George VI, and became the Queen’s Park.

But in 1999, the ownership of 26 properties held as ancient possessions by the queen in Scotland – including Holyrood Park but not Holyrood Palace – were transferred to the Scottish Government. 

So the park is owned by the Scottish Government, which in turn means that the park is actually owned by the Scottish people.

Over time, the park has became increasingly known as Holyrood Park, although it’s still also correct to call it the Queen’s Park. And when the Prince of Wales becomes king, it will also be correct to call it the King’s Park.

The Legend Of King David And The Stag

If you’re visiting the queen’s Palace of Holyrood House then you can’t miss the old abbey that sits right next to the palace. The abbey is much much older than the palace, and it was founded in the most unusual of circumstances. 

In 1128, King David I was hunting a stag in the great hunting forest that is now Holyrood Park. When David was separated  from his companions the stag turned on David and he was thrown from his horse.

On the ground, convinced that the stag was going to gore him, he saw a cross descend from the clouds above him. Grabbing the cross, he held it in front of the deer and the stag ran off.

David wasn’t quite sure what to make of this, but he knew he’d been saved. That night, St Andrew, Scotland’s patron saint, came to David in a dream and commanded David to build an abbey on the spot and to dedicate the abbey to the Holy Rood. And rood is another name for a cross.

Duddingston Loch

St Margaret’s and Dunsapie are not the only lochs in the Queen’s Park. Both of these lochs are man-made. But Duddingston Loch is a natural loch and is the only loch left in Edinburgh.

It’s a fairly big loch, 20 acres (8ha) in area and is around 10ft (3.3m) deep. It is famous for wildlife, such as many species of birds and mammals like otters, hedgehogs and water voles.

The Innocent Railway 

The ‘Innocent’ Railway path is the remains of the first underground railway built in the UK. Built to bring coal from the mines south of the city into Edinburgh. The underground part, which is a tunnel, is still there and is lit all the way.

The railway is now a cycling and walking path and runs for 2.3 miles (3.7km) from Duddingston Loch to Holyrood Road.

“The Theory Of The Earth” And Salisbury Crags

The great cliffs on the side of Arthur’s Seat known as Salisbury Crags, have a rather good claim to fame. It was while exploring these cliffs in the 18th century that James Hutton, the great Scottish geologist, discovered that the age of the earth was billions of years old, and not the thousands of years that was thought at the time.

He found that rock formations on the tops of hills that, astonishingly, could only have come from the seas. He found sea fossils and other tidal evidence in the high rocks which meant that these rocks must have pushed up by great geological pressures. These rock movements must have occurred over millions, not thousands, of years, which meant that the earth must be very old indeed.

You can still buy Hutton’s great book, the Theory Of The Earth, first published in 1788, today, in bookshops or online.

The Radical Road

The ‘Radical Road’ was a project managed and conceived by the great poet and writer, Sir Walter Scott in the 19th century at a time of great social unrest.

The steep path got its name because it was built by unemployed weavers, who were part of the ‘radical’ movement and the Radical War of 1820.

When King George IV visited the Edinburgh in 1822, Scott suggested that unemployed weavers could be used to build the footpath around the crags.

The path is still there today.