Photo: Ermell (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A self-guided audio walk through the Edinburgh of its writers. It begins in the Old Town at Brodie's Close, home of the deacon whose double life is usually given as one source for Jekyll and Hyde, then the Writers' Museum and the inscribed flagstones of Makars' Court, and George IV Bridge with the National and Central Libraries and the Elephant House café. Greyfriars Kirkyard and the lost College Wynd, where Walter Scott was born in 1771, lead down to the Canongate, where Burns paid for the headstone of Robert Fergusson, and on to the Burns Monument on Calton Hill and Conan Doyle's birthplace at Picardy Place. The walk ends in the New Town: the Scott Monument, Milne's Bar, the 'Poets' Pub' of the 1950s and 1960s, the house on North Castle Street where Scott wrote the Waverley novels, and 17 Heriot Row, where Robert Louis Stevenson grew up.
13 narrations, yours to keep — no subscription, no expiry. Works offline once downloaded, and if it isn’t for you we’ll refund it.
Going somewhere with no signal? Put the guide on your home screen first, then download it from that icon while you are on wi-fi — that way you download once, and it works in airplane mode with no roaming charges. Show me the order →
Every claim in this tour traces back to a named source — excavation records, the heritage authority for the site, and the primary texts themselves. Nothing is copied from other guidebooks, and anything we can't source doesn't make the recording.
Each stop is built from OpenStreetMap · 406 features in this old town (the field-surveyed mapping database behind Apple Maps), Wikidata · 168 cross-referenced entries (peer-reviewed structured records), the heritage authority below, and the primary historical texts where they exist.
Cross-referenced against Modern excavation publications · academic peer-review.
Every sentence is checked against those sources before it is recorded. If a claim can't be traced, it doesn't make the audio.
Every tour is reviewed by a person before it goes on sale. Stop selection, the route and anything ambiguous come back to the editor for a decision, and those questions routinely send a stop back for another accuracy pass. Nothing publishes on a machine’s say-so.
Spot anything inaccurate? Email [email protected] — fixed in the next pass.
Brodie's Close, Writers' Museum, Makars' Court, George IV Bridge: the libraries and the Elephant House.
Greyfriars Kirkyard, Scott's birthplace, College Wynd, Robert Fergusson's statue and the Canongate kirkyard, Burns Monument, Picardy Place: Conan Doyle and the Sherlock Holmes statue.
Scott Monument, Milne's Bar, 39 North Castle Street, 17 Heriot Row.
Home and workshop of William Brodie, cabinet-maker by day and burglar by night until his hanging in 1788.
Flagstones set with lines from Scottish writers, including Stevenson's 'There are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps.'
The poet who died at twenty-four in 1774, and the headstone Robert Burns paid for and wrote the epitaph for.
Thomas Hamilton's Greek Revival temple of 1830 on Calton Hill, modelled on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates.
George Meikle Kemp's Gothic spire, with Steell's marble Scott and his deerhound Maida, and sixty-four figures from the novels and poems.
Robert Louis Stevenson's family home from 1857, and the street lamp said to lie behind his poem 'The Lamplighter'.
Tap "Start Walking Tour" and allow location access. The map shows all 13 narration points.
Follow the suggested route or explore freely. GPS tracks your position. Reach a site and the narration plays automatically.
Each site has its own narration. 13 narration points.
Narrations play when you reach each site. No buttons, no track numbers. Walk naturally — the stories find you.
Premium narration that sounds like a documentary. Warm and knowledgeable, not a textbook reading.
Every narration is drafted, cross-checked against primary sources, then passed through a second editorial pass that strips unsupported claims. Dates, names, and citations verified.
See all narration points on the map. Tap any point to hear it early or replay it later.
Every narrated point in Literary Edinburgh — Burns, Scott, Stevenson and the Makars, each with its own narration.
Spend an hour or a full day. Skip sites, revisit favourites, take breaks. The tour adapts to you.
13 narration points, including Brodie's Close, Writers' Museum, Makars' Court, George IV Bridge: the libraries and the Elephant House and Greyfriars Kirkyard. That is about 29 minutes of narration in all, and you walk between the stops at your own pace.
Yes. It plays in your phone’s browser as you walk: no guide, no group, no app to install and no fixed start time.
Yes, from Leith and South Queensferry (about 13 km in a straight line). There is no start time and no group to keep up with, so you can stop at any point and head back to the ship. Keep your own eye on the all-aboard time.
Three ways, all built in:
The map-tap option means you can stand anywhere — even at home before you travel — and play any narration. GPS just makes it hands-free while you’re actually walking the site.
No. Use the “Download for offline” button before you go, and the entire tour — audio, maps, narration text — works without any data connection. Tap-to-play and the map both work fully offline. GPS itself doesn’t need data; only the download does.
Add the icon first, then download from the icon. On iPhone a guide downloaded in Safari cannot be seen by the home screen icon, so downloading first means downloading the whole thing twice.
Putting it on your home screen — iPhone or iPad (Safari):
On Android (Chrome): tap the three-dot menu at the top right, tap Add to Home screen (some phones say Install app), then confirm. On Android either order works.
If you opened this link from inside Instagram, Facebook or Gmail, you are in that app’s built-in browser. It cannot add anything to your home screen, and a guide downloaded there is thrown away when the app closes. Open the link in Safari or Chrome first.
Two backstops. First, the map shows every site — just tap the marker for the place in front of you. Second, you can manually queue any narration even when GPS is off. The platform never assumes GPS works; it’s the convenience layer, not the gate.
The audio runs ~2½ hours total, but you walk at your own pace. 13 narration points across the site. Most visitors take 2–4 hours; some spread it over multiple visits. Once you buy it, it’s yours — there’s no expiry and no subscription. Come back next year if you like; the link in your receipt always works.
One purchase covers one device session. Most couples share earbuds and use a single phone — the audio is paced for that. If you want everyone listening on their own device, each person needs their own purchase. We do not gate sharing aggressively; we trust visitors to do the right thing.
Full refund if you never trigger a single narration on-site. Partial refund based on how far you got. See the refund policy for specifics.