Edinburgh Walking Tours: Closes and Costs

Edinburgh’s free walking tours are not free, and that is fine

They are gratuity-based: the guide is paid entirely by what walkers hand over at the end, and the settled norm in Edinburgh is £10 to £20 per person for a standard two-hour walk. Budget for that and a free tour is excellent value. Turn up expecting a genuinely free two and a half hours and you are the reason a licensed guide goes home short. Here is who runs what, what a paid walk buys instead, and the self-guided route that beats both if you would rather go alone.

The named operators

  • SANDEMANs NEW Edinburgh has run the city’s signature free tour since the mid-2000s: licensed guides, several daily start times, online booking, around 2.5 hours covering the Castle Esplanade, the Royal Mile, Greyfriars Kirkyard, the Grassmarket and Victoria Street. The company has published more than one Royal Mile meeting point, so confirm the meeting point on your own booking rather than trusting a third-hand address.
  • Invisible Cities trains people who have experienced homelessness as tour guides and runs walks on Edinburgh’s social history. It is a genuinely different tour and the easiest recommendation on this page.
  • The Cadies and Witchery Tours is the costumed, theatrical Royal Mile walk, a different register again, and paid.
  • City of the Dead Tours holds the only access to the Covenanters’ Prison in Greyfriars Kirkyard.

If you would rather see what is on sale before you commit, you can compare Edinburgh walking tours and read what each one actually covers.

Walk the Mile downhill

The Royal Mile runs downhill from the Castle to Holyrood, which is both the easy direction and the historically correct one for the Royal Route. Going up from Holyrood is a climb. Say which way you are walking when you plan the day, because it changes where you need lunch and which end you need a bus from.

The closes are the actual attraction

There are around 80 narrow alleys and courts running off the Royal Mile. Four are worth going into deliberately:

  • Lady Stair’s Close, which opens into a courtyard where the flagstones of Makars’ Court are carved with quotations from Scottish writers, and the free Writers’ Museum sits at the end of it. Manuscripts, portraits and personal objects belonging to Burns, Scott and Stevenson, open seven days 10am to 5pm with last entry at 4.30pm, listed at Edinburgh’s council museums .
  • Advocate’s Close, medieval, steep, and carrying one of the best framed views of the New Town in the city.
  • Brodie’s Close, for Deacon Brodie, the respectable cabinetmaker and burglar.
  • World’s End Close, where brass markers set into the roadway show where the Netherbow Port stood, the gate in the city wall that was, for people who never left, literally the end of the world.

Free stops along the route

St Giles’ on the Royal Mile takes donations with £10 suggested, and its 25-minute audio tour costs £5.50 on your own phone in English, German or Ukrainian. It is the High Kirk of Edinburgh, a Church of Scotland parish church, and the Thistle Chapel is the set-piece inside; current arrangements are at St Giles’ .

Also free and on or just off the Mile: the Museum of Childhood, The People’s Story in the Canongate Tolbooth, the Museum of Edinburgh, Greyfriars Kirkyard, and the Scottish Parliament at the bottom, which gives free guided tours of its own building.

Five minutes south of the Mile on Chambers Street is the National Museum of Scotland: free, over 20,000 objects on display, the Grand Gallery holding more than 800 on its own, and a free roof terrace with the best Castle view in the city. Hours at the museum’s site .

The Grassmarket, and what is actually on the ground

The gallows stood at the east end. What stands there now is the Covenanters’ Memorial, a circular monument raised by public subscription in 1937, with an adjoining plaque naming the Covenanters hanged here between 1661 and 1688 during the Killing Time. A St Andrew’s Cross set into the causeway marks the exact gallows socket, replacing an original sandstone block in 1823, and a gibbet “shadow” was laid in dark paving during the streetscape works of 2009 and 2010. Look down, not up.

The self-guided walk worth doing instead

The Water of Leith Walkway runs roughly 12 miles from Balerno to Leith, following the river through Dean Village, Stockbridge and Canonmills. Dean Village is a former mill village ten minutes from the West End, and its set-piece, Well Court, dates from 1884. Walk up out of the village to Belford Road and you reach Modern One and Modern Two, both free, grounds open from 9.45am. Carry on downstream and you end in Leith, at the Shore, with Britannia at Ocean Terminal and the tram back into town.

August is a different walk

During the Fringe the Royal Mile becomes a continuous corridor of flyering and street performance. It is a genuine spectacle and it is genuinely difficult to walk through, and both things are true at once. Programme dates are published at the Fringe . If you want the Mile as a street rather than a stage, come in late May, June or September.

If you walk up Arthur’s Seat

Holyrood Park is ten minutes from the foot of the Mile, and the 251m summit is a genuine hill walk rather than an extension of the city stroll. The ground is rough and rocky, the final section is bare rock that goes slippery in rain and in ice, and it needs shoes with real grip rather than trainers. Summit weather is not Princes Street weather, and the wind off the Firth of Forth is what catches people out. Allow 45 to 60 minutes up from Holyrood and 30 on the shortest route, and check the forecast. The near-level loop past St Margaret’s Loch and the ruin of St Anthony’s Chapel is the flat alternative in the same park.

The ticketed version of all this is in the Edinburgh attraction tours guide . Practical closer: stay inside the Old Town if you want to walk the Mile before the coaches arrive, and check rates on Booking.com early, because the closes look completely different at 8am and you cannot fake that from a suburb.