Holyrood Park

A royal hunting park with four prehistoric forts in it, an extinct volcano at its centre and a ruined chapel on a crag above a man-made loch: Holyrood Park is 650 acres of highland landscape a mile east of Edinburgh Castle, and almost every period of Scottish history has left something on it.

The oldest marks are the faintest. Traces of four hill forts survive — on Arthur’s Seat, on Salisbury Crags, at Samson’s Ribs and on Dunsapie Hill — and cultivation terraces can be made out on the eastern slopes of Arthur’s Seat, ground long since given over to grass. The whole park apart from its occupied buildings was made a scheduled monument in 2013, and archaeological survey has been carried out across it, though what has been found is not yet fully understood.

Holyrood Abbey came next, founded in 1128 at the order of David I inside his royal deer-hunting park — the park existing before the abbey, not the other way round. It stayed in use until the sixteenth century, served briefly as a chapel royal for James VII, and was finally ruined in the middle of the eighteenth century.

St Anthony’s Chapel, ruined on the slope above St Margaret’s Loch, is harder to account for. Its origin and history are obscure, but it was certainly standing no later than the early fifteenth century: in 1426 the Pope is recorded giving money towards its repair. It may have belonged to the Preceptory of St Anthony, a skin hospice based at Leith around that date, or it may have been attached to Holyrood Abbey. James Grant recorded a tradition that it was raised to protect the holy spring below it — St Anthony’s Well, which dried up completely in 1674 and reappeared some decades later at a lower point on the hill.

The park in its present form dates from 1541, when James V had the ground circulit about Arthurs Sett, Salisborie and Duddingston craggis enclosed by a stone wall. In January 1542 it was extended with lands at Duddingston bought from David Murray of Balvaird, and the encircling dyke was built and afterwards repaired through negotiation between Mary of Guise and the Edinburgh burgh council. What went on inside it was not only hunting. Both James V and Mary, Queen of Scots kept sheep in parts of the park, in the care of John Huntar; in 1595 John Skene reckoned the ground could carry 800 wethers and 400 ewes, and sheep were still being kept here until 1975.

There were entertainments too. Dunsapie Loch was the setting in May 1562 for a piece staged at the wedding of John, Lord Fleming, to Elizabeth Ross — a theatrical recreation of the siege of Leith. In May 1565 Mary ordered a place built in the park for picnics or banqueting, possibly with her forthcoming marriage to Lord Darnley in mind.

Salisbury Crags, the line of cliffs 46 metres high on a spur west of Arthur’s Seat, carry the park’s most political feature. Below the cliffs a large talus slope falls away, and between the two runs a track: the Radical Road, paved in the aftermath of the Radical War of 1820 to give work to unemployed radical weavers from the west of Scotland. Walter Scott suggested it. It had a consequence nobody intended — the new road gave easy access to the upper rock face, and Charles Hamilton, 8th Earl of Haddington, who held the office of Keeper of the Royal Park, used his position to start quarrying it around 1821. The damage is still there to be seen.

The rest is landscape. Arthur’s Seat, an extinct volcano, is the highest point in Edinburgh at 251 metres and can be climbed from almost any side, the easiest way being from the east up the grassy slope above Dunsapie Loch. Three lochs lie within the park — St Margaret’s, Dunsapie and Duddingston. St Margaret’s is not natural: it was made in 1856 from what had been boggy marshland, during the works Prince Albert had put in hand around the palace.

The park is owned by the Scottish Ministers, apart from the roads, which are Crown property, and the whole is managed by Historic Environment Scotland. Its official name has been Holyrood Park since at least the 1950s, though it is still called the King’s Park or the Queen’s Park, depending on who is on the throne.