family guide · free
Edinburgh Castle
Sixteen stops in walking order, written to be read out loud on the rock. This is the audio guide you would otherwise rent — free, and in three languages, because not everyone in the family reads the same one.
Tap listen on any stop and your phone reads it out. Turn the volume up — it is windy up there. On an iPhone, check the side switch is not on silent: that mutes the reading and nothing on screen can tell you it has.
Before you go
What this replaces, and what it does not
The castle rents an audio guide handset for £4 a head. This page is that, for free, in three languages, on a phone you already own.
It does not replace admission. You still need a ticket to get through the gate, and the castle sells out days ahead in August — book online before you travel, which is also several pounds cheaper per person than paying at the gate.
Load this page before you climb
Signal on the rock is patchy and the walls are thick. Open this page at breakfast, leave the tab open, and it will still be there at the top. If anyone would rather have paper, print it — the print layout drops the buttons and keeps the words.
How to time the day
Allow two and a half to three hours to do all sixteen stops without rushing. In summer the castle opens at 9:30am, last entry is 5pm and it closes at 6pm.
Arrive at 11am and you will reach the gun terrace with time to spare. It fires at 1pm sharp, every day but Sunday. That single fixed point is worth building the whole visit around: stops 1 to 4 before it, the rest after.
The Military Tattoo runs on the Esplanade from 7 to 29 August 2026. On show days the castle closes early — around 4:30pm, with last entry at 3:30pm — and the Esplanade is full of grandstands. Check your ticket for the closing time printed on it.
The unglamorous things
The whole route is uphill on wet cobbles, and the last climb is steep. Flat shoes with grip, not smooth soles. There is a step-free route — ask at the gate, and a mobility vehicle can carry anyone who needs it up to Crown Square.
It is colder and windier at the top than at the bottom, in any month. Bring the extra layer you think you will not need. Toilets are near the entrance, at Crown Square and by the war museum; the café at Crown Square has the seats and the view.
The route
In order, uphill. Stop 1 is outside the gate.
The Esplanade
5 minFind it
The wide flat ground you cross before the gate. It's outside the castle, so it's free — you don't need a ticket to stand here.
This flat ground is man-made: a parade ground built out over the sloping rock in the 1750s. Every August it disappears under the steel grandstands of the Military Tattoo, which take weeks to build and weeks to take down. On the low wall to your left is the Witches’ Well, a small cast-iron fountain marking the spot where hundreds of women accused of witchcraft were burned between the 1400s and the 1700s.
Say this out loud
You are standing on the plug of a volcano that died 340 million years ago.
The Gatehouse
5 minFind it
The entrance with a drawbridge and a bronze warrior standing in a niche on each side.
It looks medieval and it is not. The gatehouse was built in 1888 because Victorian visitors expected a castle to have one. The two warriors were added in 1929: William Wallace on the right, Robert the Bruce on the left. Above the arch is the royal motto — Nemo me impune lacessit — "no one attacks me and gets away with it".
Say this out loud
The most photographed gate in Scotland is younger than the light bulb.
The Portcullis Gate
5 minFind it
The dark stone tunnel just past the ticket check. Stop inside it and look straight up.
This one is the real defence. It was built in the 1570s, straight after the Lang Siege, when the castle was shelled for two years and finally fell. Above your head the wooden portcullis and its iron gate are still hanging there. The decorative top storey, the Argyle Tower, was added three hundred years later.
Say this out loud
The tower is named after an earl who was locked up here before his execution in 1685.
The Argyle Battery
10 minFind it
The row of cannon on your left after the first climb, all pointing north over the city.
Six eighteen-pounder guns from the 1730s, aimed at the port of Leith and the Firth of Forth beyond it. The view is the best free geography lesson in Scotland: the New Town’s straight Georgian grid directly below, the cramped medieval Old Town behind your shoulder, and the hills of Fife across the water.
Say this out loud
They stand guard over a view they were never once fired in anger to defend.
The One O’Clock Gun
15 minFind it
The next terrace along, at Mills Mount — one modern gun under a small shelter, with a crowd in front of it before 1pm.
Since 1861 a gun has been fired here at exactly one o’clock so that ships in Leith could set their clocks by it. It works as a pair with the time ball on the Nelson Monument on Calton Hill: the ball drops, the gun fires, and a captain two miles away has the time twice over. Why one o’clock and not noon? The old joke is that it saved eleven rounds a day.
Worth knowing
Fired every day at 1pm except Sundays, Good Friday and Christmas Day. Be on this terrace by 12:40 if you want to see it rather than hear it.
Say this out loud
It is properly loud. Small ears want covering about ten seconds before.
The National War Museum
30 minFind it
Through the arch on the left at the top of the slope, round Hospital Square, in the old ordnance storehouse.
Included in your ticket, and easy to walk straight past. Four hundred years of Scottish military life — uniforms, medals, letters home, recruiting posters. It is indoors, it is warm when the wind gets up on the rock, and it has the seats.
Say this out loud
If anyone is flagging, do this bit before the summit, not after.
Foog’s Gate
3 minFind it
The last gate before the summit, with a small guardroom beside it.
Nobody knows what "Foog’s" means. The best guess is that it comes from fog, which sits on this rock more often than the postcards admit. Through it you are on the summit: a hundred and thirty metres above the sea, and the oldest ground in the castle.
Say this out loud
Everything above this gate is the part that was never captured by climbing.
St Margaret’s Chapel
10 minFind it
The tiny stone building on the summit, barely bigger than a garden shed. Easy to mistake for a store room.
This is the oldest building in Edinburgh, standing since about 1130. David I built it in memory of his mother, Queen Margaret, who died in this castle in 1093 — days after her husband and her eldest son were both killed in battle. When Robert the Bruce ordered the castle pulled down in 1314 so the English could never hold it again, he made one exception, and this is it. It seats about twenty-five. Edinburgh couples still get married in it.
Say this out loud
It was used as a gunpowder store for three hundred years before anyone worked out what it was.
Mons Meg
10 minFind it
The enormous cannon parked right outside the chapel. You will not miss it.
Made in 1449 in Mons, in what is now Belgium, and given to James II in 1457 by his wife’s great-uncle, the Duke of Burgundy. It threw a 150 kilogram stone ball nearly two miles. It also needed a hundred men to shift it three miles in a day, which made it useless as a siege gun almost as soon as it arrived. Its barrel finally split in 1681 while firing a birthday salute.
Say this out loud
One shot burned 50 kilograms of gunpowder, and the barrel then needed so long to cool that eight or ten shots was a full day’s work.
The Dog Cemetery
3 minFind it
Just past Mons Meg, lean on the railing and look down. You cannot walk into it — you look into it.
A small walled garden, used since the 1840s to bury regimental mascots and officers’ dogs. The headstones are real ones, with real names and the regiments the animals belonged to. It is the softest thing on a rock built entirely for war, and most visitors walk straight past the railing without looking over it.
Say this out loud
Ask the children to find it. It is the one thing here nobody points out.
Crown Square
5 minFind it
The enclosed courtyard at the top, with a grand building on each of its four sides.
There is no flat ground on a volcanic plug, so in the 1400s they built vaults across the rock and laid a courtyard on the roof. You are standing on top of a cellar. Royal Palace to the east, Great Hall to the south, the War Memorial to the north, the Queen Anne Building to the west — the next four stops are the four sides of this square.
Say this out loud
The prisons you visit later are underneath your feet right now.
The Royal Palace & the Honours of Scotland
25 minFind it
The east side of Crown Square. Look for the longest queue on the rock — that is the one.
The crown, the sceptre and the sword of state are the oldest crown jewels in Britain. All three were used together for the first time in 1543, to crown a nine-month-old baby: Mary, Queen of Scots. Cromwell’s army hunted them a century later, so they were smuggled out of a besieged Dunnottar Castle and buried under a church floor. Then they were locked in a chest in this castle and simply forgotten — for over a hundred years — until the novelist Walter Scott had the chest forced open in 1818 and found them still inside.
Worth knowing
The Stone of Destiny is no longer here. It left in March 2024 and is now in Perth Museum, about an hour away. Do not queue expecting to see it.
Say this out loud
Downstairs is a tiny panelled room where Mary gave birth to James VI in June 1566 — the baby who grew up to be the first king of both Scotland and England.
The Great Hall
10 minFind it
South side of Crown Square, up a short flight of steps. Walk in and look at the ceiling before anything else.
Finished around 1511 for James IV. That oak roof is the original: a hammerbeam frame that holds itself up by weight and joinery, with no nails in it, and it has been there for five hundred years. High on the wall to the right of the fireplace there is a small opening — the laird’s lug, the lord’s ear — a listening hole so the king could stand out of sight and hear what his guests said about him.
Say this out loud
Every weapon on these walls is arranged as decoration. That was a Victorian idea, not a medieval one.
The Scottish National War Memorial
10 minFind it
North side of Crown Square. The quietest place on the whole rock.
Opened in 1927 for the Scots killed in the First World War, and added to after every war since. Inside are the rolls of honour: bound books naming every single one of them, one name at a time. People come here to find a grandfather.
Say this out loud
No photographs inside, hats off, voices down. It is the one room here that is not a museum.
The Prisons of War
20 minFind it
Down the steps beneath Crown Square, signposted to the vaults — the cellars you were standing on earlier.
For about fifty years these vaults held prisoners taken at sea and in battle: French, Spanish, Dutch, Irish, American, and men from the Caribbean, some of them boys. They slept in hammocks, forged coins, ran a market, and carved the doors. One prisoner cut a Stars and Stripes into the wood — an American flag, made in a Scottish cellar, by a man who could not go home.
Say this out loud
In 1811 forty-nine of them got out through a hole in the south wall and down the cliff.
The Half Moon Battery
5 minFind it
The big curved wall on the east side, facing the city. You pass it on the way back down.
A royal tower stood here once — David’s Tower, the king’s own residence. English cannon brought it down in the Lang Siege of 1571 to 1573, and the rubble was packed in and this curved battery built on top. Everyone assumed the tower was gone. In 1912 workmen broke through and found its bottom two storeys still standing, sealed inside the wall, untouched for three hundred and forty years.
Say this out loud
The castle hid a whole tower inside a wall and nobody noticed for three centuries.