West Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh

West Princes Street Gardens is the broad public park stretching beside Princes Street, lying beneath Edinburgh Castle’s shadow. It belongs to a pair of adjoining gardens formed in the 1820s, after the Nor Loch was drained during the city’s New Town expansion. The former loch had been an artificial medieval defence, and polluted water flowing down from the Old Town made growth towards the north difficult.

Look along the garden’s southern edge for the railway cutting. The line arrived in 1846, linking Haymarket with the station that became Waverley; its construction also required the Haymarket Tunnel and a shorter tunnel through The Mound. The gardens themselves cover about 29 acres, extending towards St.

John’s and St. Cuthbert’s near Lothian Road. At the heart of the park, the Ross Bandstand dates in its current form from 1935.

It takes its name from William Henry Ross, who donated the original structure in 1877. At the western end, the Ross Fountain was given by Edinburgh gunsmith Daniel Ross and installed in 1872; its restoration was completed in 2018. Along Princes Street, the monuments include the poet Allan Ramsay, church reformer Thomas Guthrie, obstetric pioneer James Young Simpson, and Wojtek the Bear. This is Edinburgh’s best-known park, valued by residents and visitors alike.