Holyrood Park and Duddingston

Scottish Parliament

A parliament built to look like it grew out of Arthur's Seat.

You're standing on the forecourt of a building that was meant to grow out of the hill behind it. The Catalan architect Enric Miralles won the competition in 1998 and described the design as an amphitheatre coming out from Arthur's Seat. He died in 2000, two years before the building was finished. The MSPs held their first debate here in September 2004, and Queen Elizabeth II opened it the following month.

The final bill was 414 million pounds, against early estimates of somewhere between 10 and 40 million. Walk round to the public entrance and look up at the shapes above you: the towers on the east side are shaped like upturned boats, and the roof lights in the foyer are cut like leaves. Inside the debating chamber, 112 stainless steel connectors, each one different, hold up an oak roof that spans the room with no columns. Before they take their seats, members walk under the Arniston Stone, a lintel from the Parliament House that Scotland lost in 1707.

St Margaret's Loch

A man-made loch of swans, geese and a ruined chapel above.

St Margaret's Loch is a shallow sheet of water about five hundred metres east of the palace, and it's younger than it looks. Prince Albert had it dug in 1856 as part of his improvements to the royal park; before that this was open ground, and for a while afterwards the loch was used as a boating pond. The boats are gone now and the birds have it: ducks, geese and swans that gather on the water and along the bank beside the road. Queen's Drive, the loop you'll be following, was laid out in 1844, so both the road and the water are Victorian additions to a landscape people treat as ancient. Above you, on the slope south of the loch, stand the ruins of St Anthony's Chapel. It was there by the early 1400s, when money was set aside for repairs in 1426; today only the north wall and part of the west wall are left, a broken outline against the sky.