It could be my favourite structure in Edinburgh. Standing just over 200ft (61m) high, and known as the Gothic Rocket, the Scott Monument is often mistaken for a church - understandably, perhaps - and dominates the view of the eastern section of New Town along Princes Street.

The monument was commissioned following the death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832. At the time he was probably the most widely read British author of the era, with books like Rob Roy and Ivanhoe having become instant classics for readers across the UK, Europe and North America. 

Scott is credited with inventing the historical novel, using a combination of fact and fiction - reality filtered through imagination - to tell stories about Scotland's people, history and landscape. Having published the works anonymously at first with his first novel Waverley in 1814, and then using the pseudonymous 'by the author of Waverley' for subsequent books, he only publicly acknowledged that he was the author in question sometime later (and, it is said, at the encouragement of his friend Catherine Sinclair).

A public consultation was held to receive applications for a monument in Scott's honour - the three best designs would win a cash prize of 50 guineas, and the winning entry would be built. Fifty four entries were received in the competition, and the winning design was one submitted under the name John Morvo. Morvo was a French architect who had built Melrose Abbey in the Scottish Borders.... except by 1832 he'd been dead the best part of a thousand years!

It was revealed that the competition entry had been drawn up by a man named George Meikle Kemp - he wasn't an architect, and didn't have any formal training in the field. He had previously been employed by the architect William Burn as a draughtsman, and had sought to be employed as an architect on a number of building projects in Glasgow and in the Scottish Borders, but no design job ever came to fruition because of his lack of training.

Kemp revised his winning entry, and in 1838 it was confirmed that his design for a monument celebrating Walter Scott would be built in Princes Street Gardens, in Edinburgh's New Town. Construction started in 1840, with the foundation stone for the monument laid on 15 August - what would have been Scott's 69th birthday.

The Scott Monument is built of Binnie sandstone which was quarried in West Lothian. The stone was chosen because the quarry which produced it had a plentiful supply (and a lot would be needed!) but also because it was an especially oily form of sandstone, which would attract dirt and dust to the surface of the monument.

​To a modern eye the building seems dirty and discoloured - even though it had an extensive clean just over a decade ago - but it is likely that the colouring of the structure today is at least partly what Kemp wanted; instead of looking new and clean, the monument would look dirty and old, which fitted with its Gothic styling and with Scott's tendency to create historical works which were in some ways exaggerated or heightened versions of Scottish history.

By early 1844 the monument was nearing completion. And then on 6 March of that year Kemp vanished after walking home from a meeting with the head builder. His body would be found five days later in the Union Canal - the circumstances which led up to his death were never fully established, and it's possible he simply stumbled and fell into the water and drowned before anyone realised he'd had an accident.

George Meikle Kemp would never see his monument to Walter Scott completed. At the time he had only just over £200 to his name, and although there was a great outpouring of grief and his funeral was well attended, his family struggled financially in the years after his death. He was buried in St Cuthbert's churchyard.

Construction of the monument was completed in the autumn of 1844, when Kemp's son - Thomas, aged just 10 years old - oversaw the placing of the final stone. It was estimated that 23 masons died during the construction project, of illnesses related to the inhalation of stone dust and its effects on their lungs. Thomas Kemp himself would die in 1853. 

As well as featuring a marble likeness of Walter Scott himself - produced by John Steell, and featuring the author along with his favourite dog, named Maida - the Scott Monument features 68 figurines based on characters from Scott's books. These include fictional characters as well as those based on historical figures, such as Mary, Queen of Scots, George Heriot, Robert the Bruce, and John Knox. Different artists were responsible for the individual carvings, including John Hutchison, Amelia Hill, William Brodie and John Rhind. 

Visitors to the monument can still climb the 287 steps up to the four viewing platforms, including the highest 'crows' nest' outlook point at the top of the monument - the view across the Old Town and New Town (on a good, clear day) is rather incredible, and well worth the effort! A small museum to Scott can be found on the first level. Look out also for the graffiti carved into the sandstone from Victorian-era visitors on the staircases.

(Not everybody was a fan of the monument - Charles Dickens, after visiting Edinburgh in 1847, wrote: "I am sorry to report the Scott Monument a failure. It is like the spire of a Gothic church taken off and stuck in the ground..." However, Queen Victoria did like it, and was said to have asked George Gilbert Scott to use the monument as an inspiration when he produced the Albert Memorial in London.) 

The Scott Monument also features in a number of films set in Edinburgh, as well as some that aren't - notably it's one of the locations in the 2012 film adaptation of David Mitchell's time-travelling, universe-hopping sci-fi novel Cloud Atlas, and was also used by the American magician and stuntman Harry Houdini for chase sequence in a 1920s film he made called Haldane of the Secret Service, although the sequence filmed on the monument didn't make it to the final movie. (Houdini would later develop a turbulent friendship with Edinburgh-born author Arthur Conan Doyle, over the differing opinions about spiritualism). 

Today the Scott Monument is operated by Edinburgh city council, and even if you don't manage to climb to its summit, it forms a fitting feature for any exploration of the city.

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Edinburgh became the world's first UNESCO City of Literature in 2005, and is celebrated today for its wealth of literary connections. Figures like Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Arthur Conan Doyle and JK Rowling occur frequently in many visitors' experiences of Edinburgh, but there's a whole host of less familiar - or less expected - literary associations too. 

Here's my brief peek at five other bookish figures whose lives intersected with Edinburgh...
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AGATHA CHRISTIE
The city may be famous for crime novelists like Doyle, Ian Rankin, Ambrose Parry and Quintin Jardine, but the grandmother of all popular crime writers also has an Edinburgh connection.

Agatha Christie was married at St Cuthbert's church in 1930 - her second marriage, after she sought a divorce from her first husband. At that time, that she was a divorcee was scandalous enough, but the man she was marrying being 14 years younger than her was even more so!

Max Mallowan was an archaeologist, and their marriage was an elopement - they tied the knot at St Cuthbert's church with no friends or family, just two witnesses off the street. 

In her autobiography, Christie describes being married at St Columba's church in Edinburgh, rather than St Cuthbert's... Could this be an easy mistake to have made, or a deliberate red herring in her own life story?

THOMAS DE QUINCEY
Born in Manchester in northern England, DeQuincey is still best known for the semi-autobiographical novel he wrote in 1821 called Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

​His life had been full of personal drama, including bereavement, unemployment and homelessness, and he had begun using opium as a means of suppressing his pain and his moods, and became addicted - the novel he wrote was based on these experiences, including time he spent under the care of the monks at Holyrood Abbey, which in the nineteenth century was still a debtors' sanctuary.

DeQuincey died in Edinburgh in 1859 and was buried in St Cuthbert's churchyard. His work is considered by some to have inspired other writers to create stories of their addictions, itself a literary genre today. Perhaps without DeQuincey we may not have had Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, another Edinburgh literary connection.

MRS DOUBTFIRE
The original Mrs Doubtfire, of Anne Fine's children's novel Alias Madam Doubtfire, was an Edinburgh woman named Annabel Coutts, who ran a second-hand shop in the New Town. She had been married a number of times, her first husband being a seaman named Arthur Doubtfire. She had been questioned on a number of occasions on suspicion of running brothels in the city, and using her shop as a front for the money she made, hence her nickname 'Madam Doubtfire'...

In the 1970s, when Anne Fine was staying in the city, she came to know of Madame Doubtfire's shop, and would later use the name for her children's story, which later got turned into the classic family film, Mrs Doubtfire. 

The accent Robin Williams uses in the film is not just a Scottish accent but decidedly an Edinburgh accent, so it's possible he knew something of the character's local origins...
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KENNETH GRAHAME
A figure not often thought of as a Scottish writer so much as an English one is Kenneth Grahame, best known for The Wind in the Willows. But he had been born in Edinburgh before moving to England as a young child. 

His family had occupied a house on Castle Street in the New Town, in which today is a bar and a restaurant named Badger and Co., after the characters from his most popular story.

DANIEL DEFOE
Best known as a novelist for books like Robinson Crusoe, Defoe found inspiration for that story following time spent in Edinburgh in 1706.

At that time, the Scottish government was in discussion with the English parliament about what would become the Act of Union, creating the United Kingdom under one political system.

Defoe had been employed by the English government to act as a spy, and had been posted to Edinburgh under cover of working for one of the local newspapers - his job was to report back to the English authorities about the attitudes to the union that was being negotiated, and to keep them informed about developments that the official channels of communication may not cover.

During his time in the city, Defoe lived at Moubray House on the Royal Mile. The building still stands, adjacent to John Knox's House on High Street, and I often use it on tours to illustrate what many of Edinburgh's old buildings would have looked like at one time or another - narrow, with a shop front at street level and then an external staircase providing access to accommodation space on the upper floors. 

Running through the heart of Edinburgh, in the valley between the Old and New Towns, is a streak of green space that is popular with both locals and visitors to the city.

Princes Street Gardens - in two blocks, east and west, separated by the Mound - were originally private gardens for the wealthy residents of Princes Street, which had been built as housing before it become commercialised. In the 1870s the land in the valley was bought back from those citizens of New Town and has been maintained as public space ever since.

The gardens offer a welcome respite from the busy streets of the New Town, and reward visitors with a unique perspective on the Old Town - views up to the castle as well as some of the structures which run along the ridge of the Royal Mile. But they also boast intriguing features of their own - so here's my guide to these popular gardens...

Historically the valley in which Princes Street Gardens sit was carved out by glacial activity during the last Ice Age. A thin stream later flowed through the valley from the west out into the sea, and around the seventh century CE it is reputed that Saint Cuthbert established a chapel along the banks of this stream, at the site which is still occupied by St Cuthbert's parish church today.

The valley was dammed in the sixteenth century, and the stream eventually created a shallow body of water known as the Nor Loch. This served as a defensive feature, like a castle moat preventing access into Edinburgh from the north, as well as providing a (filthy, polluted) water supply for the city.

In the 1750s, ahead of the building of the New Town, the dam was removed and the lake was drained. The stream was rerouted around to the valley south of the Royal Mile, and incorporated into Edinburgh's first underground sewer system which flowed beneath the Cowgate.

Originally the railway line which runs out of Waverley station towards Glasgow didn't exist - rail services from the west terminated at Haymarket, and services from the east finished at what is now Waverley.

​In the 1840s the line was extended, to include Princes Street Station (now the Caledonian Hotel) and to run along the length of the valley behind Princes Street Gardens, which were landscaped in such a way as to disguise the presence of the rail line for the residents of Princes Street itself. 

In the 1870s, when the land was bought back by Edinburgh city council, the gardens were redeveloped and laid out to designs by City Architect Robert Morham. The head gardener's cottage which stands in the western section of the gardens today was also built by him.

Princes Street Gardens today has several military memorials, including a sculptural memorial dedicated to the Royal Scots regiment,  and the Royal Scots Greys.

​In 1927 the gardens received a memorial conceived as a gift "from the people of America", to commemorate Scots soldiers who served in the First World War.

​Created by Robert Tait McKenzie, The Call 1914 features a kilted soldier on a pediment backed by a 7-metre frieze which shows the transition of ordinary Scottish men - miners, farmers, fishermen - as they become soldiers and march off to war. 

The monument was cast at a foundry in New York state, and shipped to Edinburgh for installation. McKenzie was so proud of his work that he left a request to be buried in front of the statue on his death - because of the public nature of the gardens this request was denied by the city authorities, so instead McKenzie's heart is ceremonially interred nearby at St Cuthbert's graveyard.

Nearby you'll also find a large statue of a soldier with a bear at his side. This is Wojtek, a bear adopted by the Polish military during the Second World War. When many Polish soldiers and their families were rehoused in Scotland at the end of the war, Wojtek was brought to Edinburgh Zoo, where he lived until his death in 1963. 

The historic associations between the Scottish and Polish communities are celebrated in this contemporary monument, and the last soldier from the original unit who fought alongside Wojtek died in the city only recently. 

The large fountain at the west end of the gardens is the Ross Memorial Fountain, created in France in the 1860s and installed here in the 1870s.

​Bought by an Edinburgh gunsmith named Daniel Ross as a gift for the city, it was recently renovated and repainted at a cost of approximately £2m... The colours today are in stark (and vibrant) contrast to the more muted colouring of it previous to 2018.

Princes Street Gardens are also home to the world's oldest floral clock, first planted in 1903. You can find it near the entrance to the gardens at the junction of the Mound and Princes Street - although it only gets planted in the early summer each year, so isn't there over the winter months.

The clock is made up of over 40,000 individual succulent plants, and keeps accurate time - listen for the cuckoo which pops out to call every hour!

One of the newest memorials in Princes Street Gardens was unveiled in 2019.

​Created by Andy Scott, who also made the large scale Kelpies which can be found just outside Edinburgh, the memorial is an elephant embossed with forget-me-not flowers.

It was commissioned in response to a scandal that was uncovered in 2015 when it was revealed that the cremated remains of around 250 babies, stillborn children and foetuses were buried in secret at Edinburgh's Mortonhall Crematorium. Bereaved parents had been told that no ashes remained or were available to be returned to them, a practice which was found to have dated back over four decades. 

Also in the western section of the gardens is a small memorial to the author Robert Louis Stevenson. Born and raised in Edinburgh - and using the city as an inspiration to much of his writing - Stevenson lived the last years of his life on an island in Samoa in the western Pacific Ocean.

​The memorial stone in the grove of silver birches bears Stevenson's initials under the phrase 'A man of letters', and a fuller memorial to his life and work can be explored in the Writers' Museum in the Old Town.

In the eastern section of the gardens stands a larger memorial to another literary hero of Scotland - Sir Walter Scott. Known as the 'Gothic Rocket', and designed by George Meikle Kemp, the Scott Monument was funded by Scott's readers after the writer's death in 1832. It stands just over 60m/200ft high, and has a staircase which allows visitors to climb to four viewing platforms, including a crows' nest outlook at the very top of the monument. 

The memorial features a large statue of Scott himself, created by Sir John Steell, and is a fitting tribute to a figure who was not just an important novelist of his time but was integral to the development and promotion of Scotland as a visitor destination. 

Near the base of the Scott monument is another statue, much smaller in scale - it's almost life-size, in fact. The statue is of David Livingstone, a Scottish explorer and missionary of the Victorian age, best known for finding the source of the Congo river in Africa, as well as for becoming the first European to view the waterfalls which he named Victoria Falls -despite them already having the indigenous name Mosi-oa-Tunya ('the smoke that thunders') - on the Zambezi river. 

The statue was created in 1875 by Amelia Hill, an artist and sculptor who was exhibiting her work at the nearby Royal Scottish Academy up until the age of 82.

Princes Street Gardens contains even more memorials, monuments and features of interest than this - it's truly worth a moment of your time to step off the city streets and drink in the relative peace and quiet of the garden space... and the views of Old Town and the castle aren't too shabby either!

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