Edinburgh is built on the remains of a volcano. The Castle sits on a plug of hard rock, and the ridge that slopes eastwards from it, the Royal Mile, carries the medieval Old Town on its back, a tall, dense, soot-dark jumble of closes and tenements that went up because the city was shut inside walls and could only grow upwards. In 1767 the council ran a competition for a plan to build a New Town on the open ground to the north, and the winning design by a young architect named James Craig gave the city a grid of Georgian terraces, squares and gardens. The contrast between the two halves, medieval and classical, is the reason UNESCO listed the combined area in 1995.
The Scott Monument, a vast Gothic spire to the novelist Walter Scott, stands further east along Princes Street, and the Dean Village, a former mill hamlet in the river gorge, is a short walk to the north-west. Arthur's Seat, a crouching volcanic hill with a view over the city, rises to the east, and on a clear day the Firth of Forth glitters to the north.
Riding in Edinburgh itself is a matter of patience. Trams run along Princes Street and cross the main roads, so keep wheels clear of the rails, which are slippery when wet. Cobbles, bus lanes and one-way systems fill the old town, and parking for motorbikes is available at marked bays at the edge of the centre. Petrol stations are scarce in the middle, so fill up on the outskirts. The best riding begins outside the city, over the Queensferry Crossing, the bridge opened in 2017, and into Fife, or south into the Pentland Hills and the Borders, where the roads climb across heather moors.
The weather can turn in a quarter of an hour, with a warm sun giving way to a cold wind and rain, and locals say you can have four seasons in a day. Summer evenings are very long, with light until after ten, and August is crowded with festival visitors. A bowl of cullen skink, a smoked haddock soup, in a pub off the Royal Mile makes a fine lunch.