The Companion Guide to Edinburgh and the Borders

The Old Town and the 18th-century New Town, outlying Edinburgh, and the castles and abbeys of the Borders.

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Edinburgh is one of the world's remarkable cities because it contains both an old town, rebuilt on the medieval street plan after being burned by an English army in 1544, and right alongside the old town a new town, a planned concentration of eighteenth and nineteenth-century classical buildings which is more extensive that anything else of its kind in Europe. Edinburgh is a city of contrasts, historic, varied, surprising, challenging, spectacular; it canbe gloomy, mysterious, even forbidding; loveliness is not its forte. The visitor to the Borders is imagined as starting in Edinburgh, and taking any of four routes to the Tweed. Then, starting from Berwick-upon-Tweed, sucessive chapters take the reader on a tour to the source of the Tweed and from there back eastwards to Edinburgh. The final chapter deals with the remote hilly areas that lie close to the Border itself.

A.J. YOUNGSON is former chairman of the Fine Art Commission for Scotland.