The Grassmarket, Edinburgh

The square first appears in the written record in 1363, in the Registrum Magni Sigilii Regum Scotorum, as "the street called Newbygging [new buildings] under the castle". From 1477 it was one of Edinburgh's principal market places, and part of it was given over to the sale of horses and cattle. The name appears to derive from the grazing pens that stood beyond its western end — the animals came in through the West Port, the gate in the Flodden Wall at the far end of the square, and were sold where you are now standing.

The Gazetteer for Scotland puts the run of the weekly market at 1477 to 1911, which is when the meat market closed and a new municipal slaughterhouse at Tollcross replaced the old shambles at the western end. Daniel Defoe, sent north as an English government agent in 1706, found two open-air markets working here at once: the Grass-market and the Horse-market.

The shape of the place is still the shape of a livestock market — a very wide street rather than a formal square, wide enough to hold pens and drovers, in a hollow that the surrounding city looks down into.

The streets that run off it

Knowing the four corners saves you a wrong turn, because the square is a crossroads pretending to be a destination. At the east end it meets Cowgatehead and the Cowgate, and Candlemaker Row climbs from the same corner towards the kirkyard — the row got its name in 1654, when the magistrates designated the street for candle-making.

In the north-east corner the West Bow curves up: that is the lower end of Victoria Street, the bend that everybody photographs. King's Stables Road leaves the north-west corner towards the castle's back approach and the New Town beyond. The West Port runs west, where the wall gate stood and where the Burke and Hare murders of 1828 mostly took place, in Tanners Close.

From the south-west corner the Vennel climbs in steps, and on its east side stand some of the best surviving stretches of the Flodden and Telfer town walls anywhere in the city. Go up it about thirty steps and turn round: that is the view of the castle that people come here for, and it is free.

Edinburgh World Heritage, the body that looks after the UNESCO site, dates the square's marketplace years to the 15th to 18th centuries and its use as a place of public execution to the 16th to 18th. The heaviest years were the 1680s, the period known as the Killing Time, when over a hundred Covenanters — Presbyterians who refused to accept the King's authority over their church — were put to death here for their faith.

They are commemorated by the Covenanters' Memorial at the east end, raised by public subscription in 1937 near the site of the gibbet, with the names recorded where they are known on a plaque beside it. Many of the same dead lie a hundred metres uphill in Greyfriars Kirkyard. The phrase that survives from that period is a sneer: when one prisoner refused to save himself by swearing loyalty to the Crown, the Duke of Rothes remarked that he had chosen to "glorify God in the Grassmarket".

The Porteous Riots, and the woman who survived the rope

In 1736 the square was the setting for the Porteous Riots, which ended with a mob lynching the captain of the Town Guard; a plaque near the execution site marks where. And the story every guide tells is Maggie Dickson's — a Musselburgh fishwife hanged here for concealment of pregnancy, whose family heard noises from the coffin on the road home and found her alive. Her sentence had been carried out, so under Scots law she could not be hanged again, and she lived another forty years. The date is not agreed even by good sources: Wikipedia's account puts the hanging in August 1724, while The Gazetteer for Scotland dates it to 1728. A pub on the square carries her name.

One date this page will not print as fact is the one repeated everywhere: that the last hanging in the Grassmarket was in 1784. We could find it on no official or institutional page in this run — not Historic Environment Scotland, not Edinburgh World Heritage, not the Gazetteer — so treat it as a commonly repeated figure rather than a verified one. What the authorities do state is the period: executions here belong to the 16th to 18th centuries, after which the city hanged people elsewhere.

Where to look for the marks

The 2009-10 streetscape scheme, which cost £5 million and turned the middle of the square into a pedestrian events zone, put the history into the ground rather than onto boards. Look for three things.

First, the "shadow" of a gibbet laid in dark paving on the former gallows site, next to the Covenanters' Memorial at the east end. Second, a strip of lighter paving running across the western end, which marks the line of the Flodden Wall from the Vennel on the south side to Granny's Green Steps on the north. Third, an inscribed flagstone in the central pavement in front of the White Hart Inn, marking where a bomb fell during the Zeppelin raid on the night of 2-3 April 1916; eleven people died in that raid on the city, though nobody at this spot.

None of this is signposted from a distance, and most visitors walk over all three without seeing them. The ghost and history walks that cross the square stop at each in turn, which is most of the argument for taking one.

The Grassmarket Market runs on the central reservation of the square, EH1 2JR, every Saturday all year round, 10:00 to 17:00. It is free to walk round, the operator directs drivers to the NCP Castle Terrace car park, and there is a discount code for that car park collectable at one of the stalls if you have downloaded the NCP Park Pass app first.

The stall list is published weekly rather than fixed, and the operator prints it: the list for Saturday 29 August 2026, read the day after, ran to about thirty traders — pottery, jewellery, knitwear, leather, records and art, with hot food from a paella stand, a noodle stand and a hog roast, plus a bakery, a vegan bakery and an olive stall. It is a craft and street-food market, not a farmers' market and not an antiques market.

The same operator runs a market at Leith on one day and Stockbridge on Sundays, 10:00 to 16:00, so a weekend in the city can take in two without repeating stalls — the Stockbridge page has that one.

• Saturday only. There is no Sunday market here; Sunday is Stockbridge's day
• 10:00 to 17:00, all year, including through the festival month
• Free; bring a card, though several traders are cash-friendly
• The square stays open to pedestrians around the stalls, so the pubs and the memorial are reachable all day

Why no tourist board answers this question

The organisation that would normally publish market days, footfall and event listings for a district like this is its business improvement district. The Greater Grassmarket BID's website has refused every connection we have made to it — from two separate clients when this site's fact pack was built, and again on 30 August 2026 while this page was written.

That is why nothing here is sourced to it, and why the day and hours above come from the market operator's own page. If you are looking for an events calendar for the square — the Christmas period, festival month, the occasional street closure — the council's own listings and the venues themselves are what exist. It is a negative finding, but it is the honest answer to a question the search results ask constantly.

The Grassmarket has been a drinking street since it was a cattle market — it was where the coaches stopped when they came into the city from the west, and it has always been a place of taverns and temporary lodgings. Wikipedia's summary of the modern square is blunt: the area is, and always has been, dominated by a series of public houses, and the council has encouraged them to spill out onto the pavements.

That is the daytime charm and the night-time problem. One pub on the north side publishes closing at 01:00 seven days a week, and it is not the only late licence on the square; the 2009-10 improvement scheme deliberately widened the pavements for outdoor tables and created an events zone in the middle. On a Friday or Saturday the noise in the hollow bounces off the rock and the tenements, and it does not stop when the bars close, because the walk home for most of the square's customers is through the square.

This is not a reason to avoid the Grassmarket. It is a reason to ask for a room at the back, on a high floor, or on one of the streets running off it, and to be sceptical of a bargain rate on the square itself for a Saturday in August. If you want the address without the volume, the streets above — Candlemaker Row, Lauriston, the West Port — are two minutes' walk and a different acoustic world.

What else is on the square

Two large Apex hotels dominate the south side. One of them, the Apex International, opened in 1996 in the converted Mountbatten Building, put up in 1968 for Heriot-Watt University's electrical engineering, management and languages departments before the university moved out to Riccarton between 1974 and 1992 — which is why part of a medieval market square looks like a polytechnic.

Next to them stands Dance Base, the Scottish National Centre for Dance, built in 2001 behind a traditional frontage and running back up the slope of the castle rock in a multi-level design that won a Civic Trust Award and a Scottish Design Award in 2002. The rest of the frontage runs from the 17th century to the 21st, much of it rebuilt in the City Improvement Scheme of 1868 and filled in again in the 1920s with faux Scots Baronial blocks that were, in fact, council housing.

Twenty minutes covers it: the memorial and the gibbet paving at the east end, the Flodden Wall strip at the west, the flagstone outside the White Hart, thirty steps up the Vennel for the castle view, and back. Add an hour for the market on a Saturday, or two for lunch outside on the one warm week Edinburgh gets.

The square works best as the bottom of a downhill route. Come off the ridge by Victoria Street or Candlemaker Row, cross the square, climb the Vennel or the Granny's Green Steps for the view back, and you have seen the castle rock from below, which almost nobody does. The other approach, from the National Museum of Scotland on Chambers Street, is five minutes downhill through Greyfriars.

It is also the one part of the medieval city with genuinely open space in it, which matters with children, with a wheelchair, or with anybody who has had enough of narrow closes. The pavements are wide and level across the middle; the routes out of it in every direction except east are not.

• Quietest: any weekday before 11:00, when the square belongs to deliveries
• Market day: Saturday, 10:00 to 17:00, all year
• Loudest: Friday and Saturday from about 18:00 until the bars close at 01:00
• Best light on the castle: late afternoon from the Vennel steps, when the rock is lit from the west

Getting here

There is no station and no tram. Walking is the answer for most people: it is about ten minutes downhill from the top of the Royal Mile by way of Victoria Street, five minutes from the National Museum, and fifteen minutes from Waverley station, all of it climbing on the way back.

Lothian buses run along the south side through the Cowgate corridor and along the West Port; a single is £2.40 (about $3.26) and the Tap Tap Cap day cap is £5.70 (about $7.75). The City Sightseeing hop-on hop-off route lists the Grassmarket among its stops, which is one way to arrive with your legs intact and £20 (about $27) lighter. The square sits inside Edinburgh's Low Emission Zone, and the nearest sensible parking is the NCP on Castle Terrace, which is where the market operator sends drivers.

Use it as the bottom of the hill. A morning at the castle, down through Victoria Street into the square for lunch outside, thirty steps up the Vennel for the photograph nobody else takes, then up Candlemaker Row to Greyfriars Kirkyard and along to the National Museum of Scotland, which is free and open every day. That is a full day within a few hundred metres, and only the first item on it needs a ticket.

If you are here on a Saturday, invert it: the market first, at ten, while the square is still walkable, and the climb afterwards. And if you are choosing where to sleep, read the noise section before the booking page's photographs make the decision for you. The neighbourhoods index sets this square beside the other districts worth a half-day, and the tickets hub compares the paid attractions above it.