Rebecca Engel
Edinburgh spends August completely full. The festivals take over every hall, church and back room in the city, the Royal Mile turns into one long crowd, and hotel prices go somewhere silly. Then September arrives, everyone goes home, and the place quietly becomes itself again.
That’s the case for Edinburgh in autumn, and it’s a strong one. The stone goes dark in the rain, the hills around the city turn, the evenings draw in early enough to make a fire feel earned, and the things to do in Edinburgh that had a two hour queue in August have no queue at all. These are the fifteen worth building a trip around.
1. Climb Arthur’s Seat For The Whole City At Once
Arthur’s Seat is an extinct volcano sitting in a park in the middle of the city, which is not a sentence most capitals get to use. It’s about 250 metres up and takes most people around forty five minutes from the Holyrood side.
The top gives you everything at once. The old town along its ridge, the castle at one end, the Firth of Forth going out to the north, and the Pentland Hills behind you.
Autumn is the right season for it. The summer haze is gone so the view runs further, and the grass on the flanks turns the colour of a rusty penny.
Wear proper shoes and expect wind at the top. The last stretch is rock rather than path and it gets slippery in the wet.
2. Watch The Sun Go Down From Calton Hill
Calton Hill is five minutes from Princes Street and about ten minutes of walking up, which makes it the cheapest good view in Britain.
At the top there’s a collection of monuments that shouldn’t work together and somehow do. The National Monument is a half finished copy of the Parthenon, abandoned in the 1820s when the money ran out, and the locals have called it Edinburgh’s Disgrace ever since. It’s now the most photographed thing on the hill.
This is where the classic shot of the city comes from, looking across to Arthur’s Seat with the old town strung out below.
In autumn the sun sets early enough that you don’t have to wait up for it. By late October you’re getting golden light around half five rather than half nine.
3. See The Palm Houses Reopen At The Royal Botanic Garden
This one is genuinely good timing. The Royal Botanic Garden’s Victorian Palm Houses have been shut for five years for a restoration, and they open again to visitors on the second of October.
The work was not small. All 5,750 panes of glass were replaced, along with hundreds of square metres of ironwork and sandstone, as part of a wider project costing tens of millions. Nearly 600 plants have been moved back in, including a stone gate palm over eight metres tall that’s thought to be the tallest of its kind growing anywhere outside China.
The garden around them is 70 acres and free to walk into, and it’s one of the best places in the city for autumn colour. The glasshouses themselves are ticketed.
It’s a twenty minute walk from the centre through Stockbridge, which makes a good morning out of it.
4. Follow The Water Of Leith Through Dean Village
Dean Village is a former milling settlement on the Water of Leith, and the surprising part is how close it is. You can be standing on Princes Street and be there in about ten minutes.
It doesn’t look like the rest of the city. Tall stone buildings crowd the river, Well Court sits above the water with its clock tower, and the noise of the traffic disappears entirely.
Autumn is when it looks its best, with the trees along the water going yellow and the river usually running high after rain.
Follow the walkway downstream and you come out at Stockbridge in twenty minutes, or go the other way towards the Gallery of Modern Art. Either direction beats walking back the way you came.
5. Walk Up To Edinburgh Castle
The castle sits on a volcanic plug at the top of the old town, which is why the Royal Mile runs downhill away from it in a straight line.
Inside are the Honours of Scotland, the oldest crown jewels in Britain, and the Stone of Destiny that Scottish kings were crowned on. St Margaret’s Chapel in the grounds is the oldest building in the city, from around 1130.
The One O’Clock Gun still fires every day except Sunday, which catches out everybody standing nearby for the first time.
Autumn is a much better time to come than summer. Book a slot online anyway, but you’ll actually be able to move around inside, and the view from the ramparts over a city under low cloud is better than the same view under a blue sky.
6. Go Underground At The Real Mary King’s Close
Underneath the City Chambers on the Royal Mile there’s a set of 17th century streets that were built over rather than knocked down. The houses are still there, several storeys of them, with the city sitting on top.
The tour takes you through the closes with a guide in character, and it does a good job of being about the people who lived there rather than just the ghost stories.
It’s the right thing to do on the kind of afternoon Edinburgh does a lot of in October, where the rain sets in and the light never really arrives.
Worth knowing before you go. Photography isn’t allowed anywhere on the tour, so it’s one of the few things in this city you’ll leave without a single picture of.
7. Wander Greyfriars Kirkyard
Greyfriars is a working graveyard in the middle of the old town, and in autumn it’s the most atmospheric ten minutes in Edinburgh. Wet leaves, leaning headstones, and the back of George Heriot’s School looming over the wall.
The iron cages over some of the graves are mortsafes, put there to stop body snatchers digging up the recently buried and selling them to the medical school. That trade was a real problem here.
It’s also where Greyfriars Bobby is buried, the terrier said to have sat by his owner’s grave for years, and a number of the headstones carry names that Harry Potter readers tend to recognise. How much of that was deliberate is argued about, but the graveyard is worth the walk regardless.
It’s free, it’s always open in daylight, and it’s two minutes from the National Museum.
8. Take Victoria Street Down To The Grassmarket
Victoria Street is the curved row of coloured shopfronts that ends up on every postcard of the city, and it’s genuinely as good as the photos suggest.
The shops are worth going into rather than just photographing. There’s a joke shop, several booksellers, a cheesemonger and a good few places selling things you’ll have to find room for.
It’s widely claimed as the inspiration for Diagon Alley, which the shops on it have leaned into heavily. Take that with a pinch of salt and enjoy the street anyway.
At the bottom it opens into the Grassmarket, which is ringed with pubs and sits directly under the castle rock. Getting a window seat there as it goes dark is one of the better autumn evenings in this city.
9. Watch The Samhuinn Fire Festival On Calton Hill
On the 31st of October, Calton Hill fills with drums, fire and several hundred performers for Samhuinn, run by the Beltane Fire Society since 1988.
It stages the old Celtic turning of the year as a battle between the Summer King and the Winter King, told through drumming, dance and a lot of open flame. Winter wins, which is the point.
It’s not a polished stage show and it isn’t trying to be. It’s closer to being inside something than watching it.
Tickets sell in advance and the hill gets cold and dark, so go early, dress for standing outside for hours, and take a torch for getting back down.
10. Catch A Night Of The Scottish International Storytelling Festival
Every October the Scottish Storytelling Centre on the Royal Mile runs a festival built entirely around people telling stories out loud, with tellers coming in from all over the world.
It sounds quaint written down and it isn’t. Some of the sessions are ancient Scottish material told by people who learned it from someone who learned it from someone, and some are contemporary and sharp.
Tickets are cheap compared to anything in August, venues are small, and it’s the sort of evening you can’t get at home.
It’s also the most autumn thing on this list. Dark outside, small room, somebody talking.
11. Cut Across The Meadows Under The Trees
The Meadows is the big flat park south of the old town, crossed by long straight avenues lined with trees the whole way.
Everybody photographs it in spring for the cherry blossom. Autumn is quieter and, honestly, better, when the whole avenue goes gold and the path fills with leaves.
Middle Meadow Walk runs from the university end and is the route to take. It puts you a few minutes from the National Museum at one end and Bruntsfield at the other.
It’s a shortcut rather than a destination, which is the nice thing about it. You get it on the way to something else.
12. Spend Sunday Morning At Stockbridge Market
Stockbridge is the neighbourhood down the hill from the New Town, and on Sundays there’s a market by the river with food stalls, bakers and a lot of people standing around eating out of paper.
It’s small and it’s local rather than a tourist market, which is the appeal. Go hungry.
The rest of Stockbridge is worth an hour either side. Charity shops that are genuinely good, independent bookshops, and Circus Lane around the corner, which is a curved cobbled mews that people queue up to photograph.
It links straight onto the Water of Leith walkway and it’s ten minutes from the Botanics, so it slots neatly into the same morning.
13. Sit Down For A Proper Whisky Tasting
Autumn is whisky weather, and Edinburgh is a good place to work out what you actually like rather than nodding along to what you’re handed.
A tasting flight in a decent bar is the cheapest way in. Somebody talks you through four or five, usually across regions, and you find out whether you’re a smoky Islay person or a soft Speyside one.
The Scotch Whisky Experience by the castle is the tourist version and it’s better than that description suggests, mainly for the Diageo Claive Vidiz collection, a wall of several thousand unopened bottles.
If you’d rather skip the attraction, the old town and the New Town both have bars with several hundred bottles behind the counter and staff who are happy to be asked.
14. Take The Lift To The National Museum’s Roof Terrace
The National Museum of Scotland is free, enormous, and mostly known for the Grand Gallery, a Victorian hall of glass and iron that looks like a railway station crossed with a greenhouse.
The bit most people miss is the roof. There’s a lift to a terrace at the top with a view over the old town rooftops to the castle, and hardly anybody goes up.
It’s the ideal building for an Edinburgh autumn afternoon. You can spend three hours in there without paying anything and come out having actually learned something.
Dolly the sheep is in here too, stuffed and on a turntable, which is either delightful or unsettling depending on your feelings about Dolly.
15. Find A Fire At The Sheep Heid Inn
The Sheep Heid sits in Duddingston, a village tucked behind Arthur’s Seat that feels a long way from the city despite being inside it.
The pub claims a licence going back to 1360, which would make it the oldest in Scotland. That claim is argued over and hard to prove, but nobody disputes it’s very old, and there’s a Victorian skittle alley out the back you can still book.
The reason to come in autumn is simple. You walk round or over Arthur’s Seat, arrive cold, and there’s a fire and a plate of food waiting at the other end.
It’s popular enough at weekends that a table needs booking. Do that before you set off rather than after you’ve walked an hour to get there.
More Things To Do In Edinburgh When The Leaves Turn
A few that didn’t need a numbered slot but are worth your time if the trip runs long.
Rosslyn Chapel is about twenty minutes out of the city and worth the trip for the stone carving alone, which is dense enough to look like it was done by someone who couldn’t stop. Holyrood Palace at the bottom of the Royal Mile is the other end of the castle’s story and much quieter than the castle itself.
Portobello Beach is fifteen minutes on the bus and gives you a proper wide promenade and a grey sea, which is its own kind of good in November. Blackford Hill is the local alternative to Arthur’s Seat with a fraction of the people on it.
And Camera Obscura on the Royal Mile is a Victorian oddity full of mirrors and illusions that is far more fun than it has any right to be, especially on a wet afternoon.
When Edinburgh’s Autumn Colour Peaks
The colour here runs late. Late October into the first week or two of November is usually the best of it, later than most of Scotland because the city holds a bit of heat.
September is the trade off month. The weather is at its most reasonable and the festival crowds have gone, but the trees are mostly still green.
The other thing that changes fast is the daylight. In late September you get a normal evening. By the end of October it’s dark not long after five, and by late November the light is going by four.
That isn’t a reason to avoid November. Short days suit this city, and everything lit up along the Royal Mile at half four in the afternoon is a large part of why people like it.
What To Pack For Edinburgh In Autumn
It won’t be as cold as you’re expecting and it will be wetter. Daytime temperatures sit around ten degrees for most of the autumn, but the rain is frequent and the wind coming off the Forth makes it feel worse than the number suggests.
A waterproof jacket with a hood beats an umbrella, because the wind on the exposed bits of this city will destroy an umbrella within a day.
Bring shoes with grip. The old town is cobbles and worn stone steps almost everywhere, and wet cobbles going downhill are the thing that actually catches people out.
Layers rather than one thick coat. You’ll go from a hill in the wind to an overheated pub and back out again several times a day.
Final Thoughts
The best things to do in Edinburgh in autumn are mostly free, mostly outdoors, and mostly a walk. A hill, a graveyard, a river path, a park full of leaves, then somewhere warm at the end of it.
What the season really gives you is the city without the queue. The same castle, the same closes, the same view from Calton Hill, minus the several hundred thousand people who were here in August.
Book the castle and the fire festival, leave the rest loose, and take the waterproof.
