How the grandeur of Scotland's capital began with a rock

The National

27-05-2025

In this penultimate column of the city series, I will once again show how, like all our cities, Edinburgh developed from a small settlement to grandeur through the trinity of a fortification, religious institutions and royal patronage.
Regular readers will know that as a history writer, I very much depend on the work of national and local historians. There have been too many to mention for Edinburgh, but its history has the same problem that I have found in my researches on most of Scotland, namely that ancient records were stolen and destroyed by English invaders.
Although it actually only became the capital after numerous other places, such as Stirling and Dunfermline, had their time as the seat of government, Edinburgh has been at the centre of Scotland's history for many centuries.
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It owes that prominence largely to luck. Some 340 million years ago in the midst of the Carboniferous period, Edinburgh was home to massive seismic activity. Arthur's Seat was a volcano that formed the landscape and also left a volcanic plug – Castle Rock. Enlightenment scientist James Hutton (1726-1797), known as the 'father of geology', first proved that Salisbury Crags and the surrounding area were volcanic in origin.
Castle Rock mostly stands some 260ft (80m) above the city centre, with its summit of about 430ft (130m) high. Erosion, especially during the last Ice Age, left the cliffs to the north, south and west of the rock standing sheer while the 'crag and tail' from what is now the esplanade runs eastward down the Royal Mile. It is an unusual formation which has few similar examples elsewhere.
According to archaeological finds, the first human inhabitants came to the Edinburgh area around 8500 BCE and like elsewhere in Scotland they were probably hunter-gatherers who immigrated over many decades from the continent via what is now England. Archaeological excavations have proven that Castle Rock was used as a fortification as far back as 900 BCE. It has been in human use ever since, which makes it the longest continuously inhabited place in Britain.
It cannot be said with certainty but we can speculate that the Edinburgh area was first settled permanently during the Iron Age as a centre for a tribe who became known as the Votadini. Their capital was at the Traprain Law hill fort in East Lothian and their domination of the south-east of Scotland was recorded by the Roman writer Ptolemy who was writing in Greek and therefore knew them as the Otadini.
This tribe, which spoke an ancient Brythonic-Celtic tongue, was very much in control of the whole Edinburgh area when the Romans arrived in the first and second centuries CE. They built a fort at Cramond at the confluence of the River Almond and the Firth of Forth to the north-west of the city.
This fort was linked to the Roman settlements as far south as the River Tyne by a road known as Dere Street, which was constructed in 79-81 CE on the orders of Gnaius Julius Agricola, the governor of the Roman province of Britannia.
Amazingly it was less than 30 years ago that proof emerged of the importance of Cramond to the Romans. In 1996, ferryman Robert Graham spotted a large sculpture lying in the mud and the following year archaeologists from the City of Edinburgh Council and the National Museums of Scotland excavated what became known as the Cramond Lioness.
The well-preserved sculpture was made of white sandstone that had been imported to Cramond.
The best theory is that it was a grave marker for a Roman officer, although how it became lodged in the mud beside the Cramond Ferry steps is not known.
ACCORDING to Historic Environment Scotland's website: 'The lioness, carved from a single block of sandstone, is 1.5m long, and depicts a crouching lioness with her paws on a naked man's shoulders and his head in her mouth.
'On the plinth, two snakes emerge from below the lioness's belly. Pieces with a similar subject matter, of carnivores devouring prey, are common throughout the Roman Empire, and are interpreted as symbolising the destructive power of death.'
As shown by a plethora of archaeological finds, the Votadini seem to have co-existed with the Romans for 300 years and more, but when the Roman Empire abandoned Britain around 410 CE, the Votadini gradually moved their headquarters from Traprain Law to the Castle Rock from where the Gododdin people, descendants of the Votadini, ruled over the eastern part of what is now the Lothians.
Where did the name of the city come from? Edwin was a seventh-century king of the lost ancient kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira which joined together to form Northumbria that stretched from the Firth of Forth as far south as York.
As I have written before, Edwin was recognised by the Venerable Bede and other chroniclers as the most powerful king on the island of Great Britain.
Some historians say he came north to the Forth and established a fortress town, a burgh, which was named after him. Its Gaelic name, Dùn Èideann, 'the fort of Edwin', confirms that etymology.
Recent scholars say the whole area was named Din Eidyn in the Brythonic tongue and predated Edwin but the main evidence for that derivation comes from the epic poem Y Goddodin and it most certainly is not factual. The earliest written reference to a fort on the rock is seen in that poem, which was written much later but places it as a residence in the late sixth century of Mynyddog the Magnificent, the Goddodin warrior who died fighting the Angles at the Battle of Catraeth, usually identified as Catterick, although we do not know the exact location or date of the battle.
For hundreds of years, the history of Edinburgh was the history of its castle on the rock but as with the rest of Scotland we have no written records of what happened in Edinburgh in the Dark Ages.
We know the settlement expanded slowly but surely beside the fortification of Edwin's burgh and managed to avoid most of the upheavals that accompanied the establishment of the new kingdom of Alba after King Kenneth mac Alpin united the Scoti of Dalriada and the Picts of Fortriu in the 840s.
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A succession of kings of the Scoti and Picts had their capitals north of the Forth and as I always point out that the Kingdom of England did not originate until nearly a century later under Athelstan, termed in his own time as King of the English.
Athelstan invaded Scotland in 934 and may have campaigned in the Lothians, but he went south empty-handed and in the final years of the first millennium the Scots campaigned militarily to push the English out of the Lothians and Scottish Borders, a victory that was finally achieved in the Battle of Carham in 1018 when King Malcolm II of Alba and King Owen (the Bald) of Strathclyde united to defeat the Northumbrian forces.
The first castle on the rock was almost certainly a wooden motte-and-bailey construction, but it was not until royal patronage and religious institutions came to Edwin's Burgh that the conditions were met for expansion.
During the reign of Malcolm III, Canmore, a royal residence was established on Castle Rock though he retained Dunfermline as his capital. His queen, Saint Margaret, was living in the residence when she was told of the death of her husband and their son, Edward, killed while fighting the English at the Battle of Alnwick on November 13, 1093. Margaret died of grief just three days after the battle.
Their other son, Edgar, briefly ruled over Scotland and seems to have built some sort of castle on the Rock because he is recorded as dying there in 1107. His brother Alexander I succeeded him and may have developed the castle, though he preferred Stirling Castle as his court.
It was the sixth and youngest of what Nigel Tranter called the 'Margaretsons' who really endowed Edinburgh. A great revolutionary monarch who devised the feudal system and transformed the governance of Scotland, David I gained the throne in 1124 and immediately and significantly developed Edinburgh Castle as a royal residence.
The evidence for that assertion can be found inside the Castle to this day in the form of the austerely beautiful St Margaret's Chapel erected around 1130 by the king as a shrine to his saintly mother. It is the oldest and, in my opinion, the most beautiful building in Edinburgh.
He formally made Edinburgh one of his first royal burghs in 1124 – personally, I thought the city could have made more of the 900th anniversary last year. Whether or not he did so as the result of a legendary encounter with a charging stag, David founded Holyrood Abbey in 1128 and the king moved frequently between the Castle and the royal lodgings at Holyrood, thus creating the Royal Mile alongside which Edinburgh grew steadily.
That part of the modern Royal Mile we call Canongate was then a separate settlement and indeed became a burgh in its own right when King David issued his great charter of Holyrood Abbey in 1143, giving the Abbot secular control of the burgh.
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It must always be remembered that Leith, now very much part of Edinburgh, developed as a port even as Edinburgh was growing. According to The Story of Leith written by John Russell and published in 1922, there were actually two Leiths, North and South, and again it was King David who intervened in the port's history: 'Besides founding the Abbey of Holyrood, David I richly endowed it with lands and other gifts. In the Abbey's great charter of 1143 there is engrossed a long list of the many possessions bestowed upon it by its royal founder, and among these are the lands of North Leith and that part of South Leith which now extends from the present Coalhill to the Vaults.
'These lands, along with those of South Leith, then formed part of a wide area round the mouth of the river known as Inverleith, and are designated in the Abbey charter 'that part of lnverleith which is nearest the harbour.' These words would seem to show that even at this early date Leith had started on its career as a port.
The shortened form of the name, Leith, early became specially applied to the town, while the longer form, Inverleith, like the name Inveresk at Musselburgh, was restricted to the lands farther up the river.'
King David is known to have held Parliaments in the Castle in the latter years of his reign, and with his residence in the city, Edinburgh had its first spell as 'capital' of Scotland.
David's successor but one, King William I, the Lion or Lyon, officially lived in the Castle but spent a lot of time in Haddington – a mistress, perhaps? After his defeat at the 1174 Battle of Alnwick, King William was captured and imprisoned by Henry II of England who imposed the humiliating Treaty of Falaise on William that included transferring Edinburgh Castle to English control. Henry also nominated the Scottish king's wife, Ermengarde de Beaumont, and the Castle was her dowry.
Find out next week about Edinburgh's role in the Wars of Independence.