THE CAPITAL VOLCANO
Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh
Edinburgh is the kind of city you’d consider implausible if you first read about it in the pages of a Harry Potter novel: bodysnatchers, beaches, a cliff-top castle, lost loch, tidal island and – why not? – a volcano right in the middle of it. Ludicrous. But Arthur’s Seat is the geographical special effect every city wishes it had: a mountain small enough to fit within the city’s limits, yet characterful enough to lend it a raffish air and a flattering perspective from which it can always be admired. At 823ft (251m) it may be footstool-sized as hills go, but this cliff-fringed, fort-studded, loch-dotted looker is an engrossing eminence to explore. Part of a huge volcano that incorporated the city’s Castle Rock and Calton Hill around 350 million years ago, Arthur’s Seat was styled by a passing glacier much more recently – around two million years ago. That gave it the cliff-curtain of Salisbury Crag, which in turn helped form modern geology. Today the hill can be climbed from almost every direction in under an hour, and provides an enviable nursery slope for locals’ sense of adventure. There’s still much to ponder as you walk. Like how did it get its name? Was it the site of Camelot? And who hid 17 tiny coffins, complete with model stiffs, found high in the crags here in 1836?