Charles Dickens said, “Coming back to Edinburgh is like coming home.” For me, it’s been over 40 years since I went on an Edinburgh exchange with UBC’s women’s field hockey team. For my husband Ken, it’s a first-time visit. We’re primed for some Celtic fun.

Edinburgh, Scotland is well-known for its sloping Royal Mile with Edinburgh Castle on top, the Palace of Holyroodhouse at its base – and a gazillion pubs in between. The Edinburgh Review of 1838 stated that Edinburgh’s architecture is in its landscape. By day, the castle is a craggy landmark and, by night, it’s a fully-lit musical spectacle known as the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. August is the Scottish capital’s busiest month, memorable for the Tattoo and the festival atmosphere.

Here are seven ways to celebrate:

WALK AROUND

The Edinburgh Festival Voluntary Guides Association leads free two-hour walks along the Royal Mile during August from the castle crag to the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Tours leave from the City Chambers, across from St. Giles Cathedral, mid-morning and mid-afternoon on the Royal Mile.

Our guide, John Thompson, is a retired teacher in tweed tam. He’s one of 60 guides in this association, which started in 1947. Our group follows him down steep Old Town side streets known as closes.

He takes us by Dean Brodie’s Tavern. This 18th-century rogue inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll-and-Hyde story of good versus evil. Law and order in mind, we visit the impressive hammer-beamed oak roof of Parliament Hall, which houses the Supreme Court of Scotland. Nearby, church reformer, John Knox is allegedly buried under parking stall #23 of St. Giles Cathedral parking lot. Check out the free Writers Museum for more on the Scots scribblers: Stevenson, Scott and Burns at the top o’ the Royal Mile.

JK Rowling began and ended her Harry Potter series from the Elephant Café and the Balmoral Hotel. At Maxie’s Bistro, we crunch French bread over a bowl of pureed pepper-and-stilton soup, overlooking JK’s inspiration for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a 17th-century school with turrets and towers.

We revisit the Royal Mile a day later with Brian, another volunteer guide. He gives us more of Scotland’s complex history. We’ve done our homework with the 10-episode series, A History of Scotland hosted by author, archaeologist and BBC television presenter, Neil Oliver. We finish up beside the Palace of Holyroodhouse across from the controversial Scottish Parliament Building on the edge of Old Town, completed in 2004, 10 times over-budget.

PARTAKE OF THE PALACE OF HOLYROODHOUSE

The Queen’s residence for one week a year in early July, it was founded as an Augustinian monastery in the 12th century and converted to a palace in the 15th. Mary Queen of Scots married twice here. She witnessed the murder of her personal secretary at the hands of a jealous-first-husband, Lord Darnley, later murdered by husband-number-two.

The serenity of a roofless abbey alongside the palace gardens (where the Queen hosts her July tea party for 8,000 guests) gives us a viewpoint to watch hikers tackle Arthur’s Seat, which some say is the ancient site of Camelot – 250 metres uphill to a splendid panorama.

TALLY HO TATTOO

The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo is an August-only display that we booked early. It’s been sold out nightly (except Sundays) for the past 18 years and is never cancelled. There are a variety of international bands. Young men and women in tartan uniforms march across the esplanade while light projections flash on the castle walls. Our hearts thump in time.

The 100-minute spectacle tracks the history of military music: drums, trumpets, bugles, horns, bagpipes, fiddles and fifes (a small, high-pitched flute). Some groups sing, like the US Army Europe Band and Chorus; some ride motorcycles, like the Imps Motorcycle Display Team; some highland dance. Most march the slightly downhill incline from the Gatehouse on the Castle Esplanade parade grounds to the Royal Palace. The show starts at 9pm and culminates with a fireworks finale. Over 800 musicians perform for 8,000 spectators.

CLIMB TO THE CASTLE

Edinburgh Castle, strategic and defensive since 1125, sits on Castle Rock, a long-extinct volcano. Through the gates, past the guns, barracks and batteries is St. Margaret’s Chapel, the oldest building in Edinburgh. There, Queen Margaret married Malcolm III who’d murdered the previous king, Macbeth, of Shakespearian fame. Their son, King David I, built the chapel in her honour, and founded the abbey at the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

To view the crown, the bejewelled sceptres, swords and the Stone of Scone, upon which all Scottish monarchs have been coronated (including monarchs of England right up to Queen Elizabeth II) you’ll need to line up. In the Royal Apartments, Mary, Queen of Scots, bore her son James, later James I of England, who later attained the crown without bloodshed – an astonishing feat given the otherwise gory history.

The National War Memorial commemorates over 200,000 Scottish soldiers who sacrificed their lives in WWI and WWII, as well as the late 13th and early 14th-century Scottish heroes, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. The National War Museum of Scotland displays how the Scots went from English resistors to defenders, with shrewd government recruitment strategies.

Over a tureen of soup at The Tea Rooms in Crown Square, we look northeast across the Scottish Lowlands and the Firth of Forth to the County of Fife on the North Sea and appreciate how fortifying this castle has been over the centuries.

LOVE THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF SCOTLAND

Discover this museum (by donation) through app or map. One of four Scotland National Museums, we follow Scottish history in seven stacks or levels with our guide, Janet. A spry senior, she walks us through the ages from Early People one floor below ground level to the roof terrace, where we track back down on our own.

With made, found and used items on display in bright new galleries, the museum is an impressive show-and-tell. Dolly, the stuffed sheep, presides over her flock of tourists. Over two decades have passed since she became the first cloned animal – (cells from mammary glands give her a Dolly-Parton-designation).

Our top three museum memorabilia are:

A. The Millennium Clock: Animating the best and worst of the twentieth century, a Bach concerto plays on the hour in this 10-metre-high cathedral clock from the crypt where an Egyptian monkey cranks up heinous Stalin-Lenin-Hitler figures to the belfry’s 12 Requiem symbols and the spire’s Pieta, for compassion and pity. The moving parts are thanks to five master artisans’ wood, glass and metal designs.

B. The Lewis Chessmen are 12th-century gaming pieces (enough for four complete sets totalling 64 pieces) carved from walrus ivory. Found on the Isle of Lewis, they were probably in transit from Norway to the Western Isles before a shipwreck left them embedded in sand. Eleven pieces rest in Edinburgh; the rest are in London.

C. The Bute Mazer or communal feasting cup is made of maple with a silver foot and a whalebone lid. There’s an embossed lion in the bowl, representing Robert the Bruce surrounded by the six shields of his supporters. Robert the Bruce likely sipped from it in the same way Robbie Burns suggested in his 18th century hit, ‘Auld Lang Syne’: ‘We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet’ to drink in the New Year.

We make for the Balcony Café on level three, one of three eating options at the museum, to sip our own ‘cup o’ kindness’ – steeped tea with a tasty scone.

BASK IN THE SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY

A 10-minute walk down Princes Street from the National Museum, is a sumptuous collection of masters: Rubens’ ‘The Feast of Herod’ and, adapted from Botticelli’s master Fra Filippo Lippi, ‘The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child’, Titian’s ‘Venus Rising’ and the Impressionists: Degas’ ‘Woman Drying Herself’, Monet’s ‘Meadow at Giverny’ and Van Gogh’s ‘Olive Trees’.

Six-o’clock vocal concerts bring the works to life through pictorial music, which is music that interprets art. Ours is local soprano, Emily Mitchell, singing the works of Debussy, Berlioz and Vaughn Williams. Piano accompaniment, rococo-and-dark-green-painted walls, high acoustic ceilings and ornate frames ring out the richness of the space.

SAVOUR THE FOOD

It’s great to find eateries near sites of interest. Near the Tattoo entrance, we sit outside The Hub Café with its gothic spire atop the Royal Mile. We’ve taken advantage of castle proximity to The Tea Rooms, the National Museum to the Balcony Café and Old Town to Maxie’s Bistro. There is one more restaurant we keep returning to.

I discovered Hendersons’ ‘Eat Better, Live Better’ philosophy in 1975 with field hockey teammates. In 1962, Mac and Janet Henderson brought fresh, local and organic produce from their East Lothian farm to The Salad Table at their New Town location. It was novel then; it’s comfort food now.

Jazz, every night from 7pm. Along our walking route back to our Air BnB, healthy salads cap off a day sightseeing with cherry pie à la crème or flapjack: the Scots oat bar. They’re still winning Business of the Year and Best Vegetarian Establishment awards, 50 years on.

We stumble upon another festival in this most festive of cities – the Edinburgh International Book Festival in Charlotte Square Gardens. My souvenir, Claire Macdonald’s The Scottish Food Bible defines Scottish fare in one word: quality. She highlights native breeds of beef: Aberdeen Angus, Highland, Longhorn, Shorthorn and Galloway, along with lamb, pork, game, fish and shellfish. Dairy and produce also excel. Having eaten potatoes with most meals (tatties in Lowland Scots lingo) – mashed, chipped or in a potato scone or fishcake, I’d have to agree with Claire. Scots food exudes quality. Then there’s Mac and cheese. Ours is with sun-dried tomatoes and breadcrumbs.

Scots import wine as a beer complement. Beer and Scotch are pillars of Scots spirits. Tennent’s, their leading pale lager is brewed in Glasgow, while Scotch (whisky made in Scotland from malted barley) affords food pairings par none.

Dare to do Edinburgh in August. Ah dinnae ken (I don’t know) a more bonnie vacation.

IF YOU GO:

Accommodation: Air BnB along the Water of Leith is where we meet Andrea and Alberto, our Belgrave Crescent super-hosts (Air BnB reserves the term ‘super-host’ for their most experienced and highly-rated hosts, committed to providing a fabulous stay for their guests). They are a half-Scottish, half-Spanish couple who bicycle travel off-season, such as a tour this winter to South America. Seven minutes by foot to Princes Street and 25 to the Royal Mile, four rooms provide access to a homey home-base: quiet, clean and spacious. Breakfasts are in a self-serve dining room: muesli, yoghurt, juice, fruit salad, toast, croissants, tea/coffee and jams.

Festivals: Three Edinburgh festivals run side by side through August.
a) With its 70th anniversary last year, the Edinburgh International Festival offers opera, music, dance and theatre at a multitude of venues.
b) The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the largest arts festival in the world, where street performers mime, juggle, sing songs, tell jokes, play bagpipes, light fires, jump through hoops, and balance on ropes and stilts. With just under 300 venues, you can’t avoid an invite to a show, every 10 steps. Founded in 1947, it’s the first of all worldwide Fringes and is best known for presenting small-scale and un-juried pieces (mostly comedy). Also featured are spoken word, physical theatre, circus, cabaret and variety shows.
c) The Edinburgh Art Festival is the UK’s largest annual celebration of the visual arts with over 40 exhibitions, most of which are free.

Transit: We arrive at Edinburgh’s Waverley Train Station (Britain’s largest station outside London) in Scotland’s capital city and roll carry-ons onto Princes Street. We book Brit Rail passes well ahead (the only way to get them) and reserve train seats a few days ahead. Visiting via train compels further exploration (such as a daytrip to Glasgow in under an hour). Travel within the city by foot, bus and tram.

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