The New Town

Continue up Waterloo Place as it turns into Regent Road as far as the rather depressing authoritarian bulk of St Andrew's House on the right hand side.

Standing on the site of old Calton Jail, St Andrew's House was modelled on the United Nations building in Geneva. It was opened as the new Scottish Office on the day Britain declared war in 1939 and still houses some of its departments.

Continue round the corner to take in the enormous expanse of Thomas Hamilton's Royal High School.

This much more pleasing building was very nearly the seat of Scotland's own parliament; the colonnaded facade of its stately old portico looks past Hamilton's monument to Robert Burns down to the much larger purpose-built parliament building under construction in Holyrood Road.

Hamilton's school building is the most complete contribution to the Greek Revival in Edinburgh. Work started on it in 1825 as the new home for the city's oldest school (since 1519), whose old pupils included Walter Scott and at least three future Lord Chancellors of England. In 1968 the school moved out to the genteel northwestern suburb of Barnton and is now one of the city's better state comprehensives. The building now stands empty as people debate various schemes which might best be housed in it.

The collection of buildings here on the hill explain why Edinburgh was given the title 'The Athens of the North'. The democratic pile of the school is something like the Temple of Theseus; the Burns monument opposite imitates the choragic monument to Lysicrates; up on the hill behind, the City Observatory is based on the Temple of the Winds, standing next to the final touch, a bit of the Parthenon itself in the shape of the unfinished National Monument (see below).

Branch off left into Regent Terrace.

This smart row of terraced houses, with private gardens sloping down to the right, is the home of foreign consulates and private art galleries. As it rounds the bend of the hill it turns into the elegant curve of Carlton Terrace (with an 'r'), named in the 19th century after the Prince Regent's London home, Carlton House, at the time of his visit to Edinburgh.

At the end of Carlton Terrace turn left into Royal Terrace.

This is the grandest and most spectacularly positioned residential street in the city. The simple form of Greenside Church, with its square steeple topped with four tall pyramids, beckons you from the end of the street.

Turn left at the end behind the church and climb the steep sloped steps to reach the top of Calton Hill for one of the finest views to be had of the city-with the Forth Road and Rail Bridges away in the distance.