George IV Bridge

See Edinburgh#Connect for how to access. The internet stations are in the Learning Centre, and the building houses Central Lending Library, Central Reference Library, Central Children's Library, Edinburgh and Scottish Collections, Art & Design Library and Music Library. It has a wealth of material for research such as old newspapers and maps, but births, marriages and deaths are filed at East Register House by the bus station in New Town.

A venerable reference library, which you need membership to access, but it has public exhibitions about literature. "Treasures" is its permanent exhibition. But don't stumble in here mistaking it for Central Library across the street.

Superb museum of Scotland's heritage. You enter into the lofty Victorian Grand Gallery, where the millennium clock chimes on the hour. Exhibition halls cover Scottish and world history and culture, science, technology, art and design, and natural history. Dolly the sheep, the 12th-century Lewis chess pieces, and dinosaurs are some of the highlights. NMS also run the War Museum in the castle, the Museum of Flight near Gullane, and the Museum of Rural Life in East Kilbride.

It's often called a Cathedral, but the Church of Scotland brooks no such episcopal entity, and Charles I dubbing it "cathedral" in 1633 was one reason his head was chopped off. Safer to call it "High Kirk", though they're nowadays lenient with first time offenders. The present building is from 14th century with much Victorian Gothic, notably its crowned spire. Highlight is the Chapel of the Order of the Thistle, Scotland's chivalric company of royal knights. Services are M-F at noon and 9:30AM and 11AM on Sunday, with choral music at 6PM.

David Talbot Rice (1903-72) was in the louche crowd at Oxford that inspired Brideshead Revisited and became a distinguished scholar of East Mediterranean and Russian art, with extensive contacts in those parts - how come this fellow was never implicated in a spy ring? His spell as University Vice Principal is commemorated in this gallery with changing exhibitions of contemporary art. It's housed within Old College of Edinburgh University, a fine building built between 1789 and 1827 by Robert Adam and Henry Playfair. The Georgian Gallery has a Playfair interior and a mixture of Old Masters and modern installations.

Thomas Gladstone was a wealthy merchant, and in 1617 he had this house refashioned to accommodate his family and to partly rent out. A "Land" means a tall narrow townhouse from the period when Old Town was cramped and the only space for development was upwards. Typically along the Royal Mile the ground floor was shops and trade, genteel folk lived on the first and second floors, and lower-income residents had to lump up many steps to the upper floors. It's now a museum run by the National Trust for Scotland exhibiting 17th century elite city life, richly furnished and decorated but with no running water. In the 18th century prosperous folk relocated to New Town, where the NTS property at 7 Charlotte Square continues the story.