16/06/2026
The Radical Road. 🌅🏴
That’s what it’s called.
And the name is not decorative.
The city was still quiet. That particular Edinburgh silence that exists for about an hour before the world remembers itself. I started at the foot of the path, the Salisbury Crags rising above me, and walked.
Up. Along the crags. The rock face on one side. The whole city on the other.
And then the sun started coming up.
Edinburgh spread out below. Every rooftop. The Castle on its rock. The Forth glinting in the distance. The New Town’s Georgian geometry stretching north. Arthur’s Seat rising behind me.
All of it. Silent. Gold.
I finished in the crags and stood there and didn’t move for a while.
Now let me tell you why it’s called the Radical Road.
In 1820, Scotland rose up.
Workers — weavers, tradesmen, labourers — fed up with unjust conditions, with poverty, with a government that didn’t see them — staged a national strike. It began in Glasgow. It spread. Protest leaders were arrested. Some were executed. Some were transported to the colonies.
The Radical War of 1820. A Scottish insurrection that most people have never heard of.
Two years later, King George IV visited Edinburgh. The first reigning British monarch to visit Scotland in 171 years.
Sir Walter Scott — yes, him again — had helped organise the visit. And afterwards, he had an idea.
Those unemployed weavers from the west of Scotland. The ones who’d been part of the uprising. The ones who had no work and too much time to organise.
Why not bring them to Edinburgh?
Put them to work building a path around Salisbury Crags.
Hard work. Far from their communities. Far from their networks. Far from anything that might lead to more unrest.
The weavers built this road.
Their radicalism became the name of the path they built under supervision.
And Edinburgh children skipped rope to a rhyme ever after:
“Round and round the Radical Road, the radical rascal ran…”
In 1829, the composer Felix Mendelssohn walked this same path.
He was so moved by the view that he wrote home saying he wanted to live in Edinburgh.
He applied for a professorship. He didn’t get it.
Scotland’s loss. The view remains.
And the rocks beneath your feet?
James Hutton — the father of modern geology — studied these specific crags in the 18th century.
Standing here, examining this volcanic rock, he arrived at a theory that changed science forever.
The earth was not thousands of years old.
It was millions.
He proved it here. On this path. On these stones.
Walking the Radical Road at sunrise, the city still sleeping below —
You are walking on the work of men punished for wanting better lives.
On the ground where the age of the earth was discovered.
Over a view so beautiful a composer wanted to stay forever.
Scotland puts all of this in a single walk.
Free. In a city park. Ten minutes from the Royal Mile.
