East Princes Street Gardens: free audio guide
The story of East Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh, as the Votura app tells it on location. Read it here, or hear it on the spot with turn-by-turn walking directions.
Before you go
- Address
- East Princes St, Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh, EH2 2DG
The story
East Princes Street Gardens is one of Edinburgh’s most remarkable public green spaces, tucked directly below the great sandstone wall of Princes Street and facing the dramatic skyline of the Old Town and Edinburgh Castle. The gardens occupy a strip of land that was once the Nor Loch, the polluted body of water drained after the North Bridge and the Mound reshaped the city, and their existence is tied to the great urban transformations of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The site forms the eastern section of the larger Princes Street Gardens, which are divided into East and West by The Mound. As you move through it, the whole place feels like a living hinge between the medieval city and the Georgian New Town.
One of the park’s defining features is the Scott Monument, the towering Gothic memorial to Sir Walter Scott completed in 1844 and designed by George Meikle Kemp, a self-taught architect who won the competition for the project. At 61.1 metres high, it is one of the largest monuments to a writer anywhere in the world, and its blackened sandstone spire has become one of Edinburgh’s most recognizable silhouettes. The statue of Scott beneath the canopy and the intricate carvings around the base make the monument as much a literary shrine as an architectural landmark. Nearby, the Ross Fountain, cast in France by the Antoine Durenne foundry and installed in 1872, adds a striking burst of cast-iron ornament and color to the garden’s east end.
The gardens also serve as a stage for some of Edinburgh’s most important civic and cultural gatherings. Each August, the Edinburgh Military Tattoo uses the castle esplanade above the gardens, and the fireworks, pipes, and marching bands turn this whole corridor into part of the city’s biggest festival landscape. At Christmas and in the winter season, East Princes Street Gardens becomes a major setting for the Edinburgh Winter Festival and Christmas Market, with rides, stalls, and an ice rink drawing huge crowds into the heart of the city. The gardens are not only ornamental but practical too, offering broad lawns, paths, and seating that absorb the flow of residents, commuters, and festival visitors moving through central Edinburgh every day.
What makes this place so memorable is the way it frames Edinburgh’s story in stone, water, and greenery all at once. The gardens sit below the New Town, the historic city plan associated with the 18th-century expansion that made Edinburgh a model of Georgian urban design, and they look up to the Castle rock that has dominated the city for centuries. To the west and north, the edge of the gardens opens toward Waverley Station, the major rail hub that takes its name from Scott’s Waverley novels, reinforcing the literary geography of the area. In 1991, the gardens, together with the rest of the Old and New Towns of Edinburgh, became part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a recognition that underlines how central this landscape is to the city’s identity.
For visitors, East Princes Street Gardens works as both a destination and a viewpoint, offering one of the clearest public perspectives on Edinburgh Castle, the Scott Monument, and the layered city around them. Its benches, lawns, flowerbeds, and commemorative features are not isolated attractions but part of a carefully shaped urban parkland that turns a former loch into one of Scotland’s most photographed settings. It is a place where the city’s literary legacy, festival life, and historic topography meet in a single walkable space, and that combination is exactly why it remains so beloved by locals and travelers alike.
Written for the Votura audio tour and read aloud in the app. Opening hours change, so check with the venue before you go.
Self-guided tours that stop at East Princes Street Gardens
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Hear it on the spot
Votura plays this guide when you reach East Princes Street Gardens, then walks you to the next stop. Works offline.