Walks · Edinburgh · English
5 narrated stops, 16 minutes of stories, 3.2 km on foot. Press play at each stop — no app needed — or open the walk in Avsha and let the stories keep coming as you move.
Stop 1 · 3 min
In short: Dean Village was Edinburgh's industrial heart, where eleven watermills ground grain for over eight hundred years. Known as the village of the Baxters, or bakers, its old buildings still feature stone carvings depicting scales, wheat sheaves, and bread loaves.
↓ 700 m · 10 min to the next stop
Stop 2 · 3 min
In short: St Bernard’s Well is a Neoclassical temple built in 1789 to protect a mineral spring. Designed by Alexander Nasmyth, the pump room provided sulphurous water that Georgian citizens believed could cure various ailments, including gout and blindness.
↓ 1000 m · 14 min to the next stop
Stop 3 · 3 min
In short: Built in 1827, the tower housed armed guards to protect fresh graves from body-snatchers known as Resurrection Men. These thieves stole corpses to sell to medical schools for dissection when the supply of legal cadavers became insufficient.
↓ 1.1 km · 16 min to the next stop
Stop 4 · 3 min
In short: The Scott Monument in Edinburgh is the world's largest memorial to a writer. It was designed by George Meikle Kemp, a self-taught joiner who used the pseudonym John Morvo and drowned in 1844 before the Gothic masterpiece was completed.
↓ 400 m · 6 min to the next stop
Stop 5 · 3 min
In short: During the 1400s wool boom, builders used green, unseasoned oak because they were in a constant rush. As the moisture left the timber over centuries, the oak twisted and warped, creating the town’s characteristic crooked silhouettes.