Edinburgh's Secret Places

Thousands of visitors walk past the entrance to Dunbar's Close every day without realizing a garden is tucked behind it. Follow the narrow cobbled close off the Canongate and it opens out into a formal, 17th-century-style garden of clipped hedges, herb borders and quiet parterres.

It wasn't always this peaceful — the site was a building plot until 1976, when the Mushroom Trust funded landscape architect Seamus Filor to design a garden in the style of the townhouse gardens that once lined the Royal Mile's rear plots. The Trust donated the finished garden to the City of Edinburgh Council in 1978, and the council's Parks Department has maintained it ever since.

High church walls shelter one side, clipped hedging the others, creating several distinct, sheltered sections rather than one open lawn — each with its own mood, from shaded and still to sunlit and open.

At the foot of Arthur's Seat, beside Duddingston Loch and the 12th-century Duddingston Kirk, Dr Neil's Garden began in 1963 as the personal project of two local GPs, Dr Andrew and Dr Nancy Neil, who spent years shaping the site into a garden specializing in conifers, heathers, alpines, primulas and rhododendrons.

It's a genuinely personal place rather than an institutional one — the Neils' own description of their goal was simply somewhere for people to slow down and reconnect with nature, and that intention still shapes how the garden feels today.

A charitable trust run by local volunteers now maintains the garden, funded largely by visitor donations rather than ticket sales — entry itself remains free.

Built between 1899 and 1902 as a pedestrian link between North Bridge and Market Street, the Scotsman Steps fell into neglect for decades before artist Martin Creed transformed them in 2011 into a permanent public artwork titled 'Work No. 1059' — commissioned by The Fruitmarket Gallery, which sits directly across the street.

Each of the 104 steps is clad in a different type of marble, drawn from quarries representing every major marble-producing region in the world. Creed himself described the result as 'a microcosm of the whole world' — climbing the staircase means physically stepping through dozens of countries' worth of stone.

Because the steps are a public road owned and maintained by the City of Edinburgh Council — not a gallery installation behind a ticket desk — there's genuinely no cost and no opening hours to work around.