Grassmarket, Edinburgh

Grassmarket opens out as a historic market street and event space beneath Castle Rock, in a hollow considerably lower than the surrounding Old Town. The castle dominates the northern view, a scene that has attracted painters and photographers for generations. This was already an important Edinburgh market by 1477, with livestock trading helping give the place its name.

In 1706, Daniel Defoe described separate open-air markets here for general goods and horses. The site later became known for crowded lodging houses. During the 1840s, as many as twelve people could share a room, and a public-health report in 1888 counted 414 residents in seven lodging houses.

The meat trade ended in 1911, when slaughtering moved to a new municipal facility at Tollcross. Look for the inscribed paving stone near the White Hart Inn: it marks where a bomb fell during the Zeppelin raid of the night of 2–3 April 1916, although nobody died at that exact spot. Grassmarket also carries the memory of public executions.

A memorial records more than 100 Covenanters killed between 1661 and 1688. As local legend has it, Margaret Dickson survived her hanging here in 1724 and was freed because the law considered her sentence complete.