Part One of Six: Scott Monument & the Tartan Kilted Bagpiper.
Our overview / walk starts at the Tourist Information Centre for Edinburgh & Scotland, on the rooftop of Princes Shopping Mall, which is at the east end of the city's main thoroughfare; Princes Street. (Most local buses will pass this location, as they go through the city-centre and this is where you would arrive in Edinburgh if coming by train or airport bus.) After taking the scenic route, through Princes Street Gardens, which runs along the valley that separates Edinburgh's Old & New Town, we climb the hill that will finally take us to the fortress of Edinburgh Castle.
From ornamental iron railings lining the edge of the rooftop we can take in our first and most defining iconic view of “Auld Reekie” (Edinburgh). A view where the symbol of the city, Edinburgh Castle, watches over her Old Town medieval relics, Gothic follies and higgledy-piggledy tenements and down on neo-classical Greek temples and Georgian rectangular splendour of her New Town.
Edinburgh, the Capital of Scotland, has a population of only 450,000, but she plays host to excellent art galleries and museums and has a very good selection of restaurants and shops - quite a few of them only a short walk away from our viewpoint here in the heart of this city.
Now listen, above the hubbub of the city, there is a familiar Scottish sound. Someone on the street below is entertaining tourists and passers-by with their Bagpipes. The skirl from them washes over a guy who sits unmoved under the large, dark, Gothic tower rising up in East Princes Street Gardens.
This is the Scott Monument and the statue of Sir Walter Scott has been under the monument commemorating him, with his dog Maida, since 1846. Known as The Wizard of the North, Scott grew up in Edinburgh and became famous for his prolific writing. They include a series of novels that give their name to the 'Waverley' rail station, which nestles in the valley beneath Princes Mall. 
Walter Scott found some of his Celtic romanticism in James Macpherson's popular poem-cycle 'Ossian', which inspired and helped him tell the stories of Scotland's past, ancient and modern, in his wildly successful genre; The Historical Novel. 
Stone-carvings decorating the Scott Monument are characters from Walter Scott's novels and poems. Our tartan-clad bagpiper shrill tune laments those characters, as well as being one of Scott’s characters himself.
Scott fashioned his vision in tartan on the Savage Warrior of the wild, remote and beautiful glens of the Scottish Highlands. Their cause was lost twenty years before Scott's birth and their clan way of life was suppressed. Their traditional dress (The Kilt), refashioned by Scott for a king's visit to Edinburgh, was widely adopted by Scottish Regiments of the British Army and of course is a popular outfit for men to wear at Scottish Weddings, Rugby matches, Ceilidhs (Dances) and other shindigs throughout the land.
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