Palace of Holyroodhouse

From an abbey of 1128 to a palace of 1671

David I founded the Augustinian abbey of Holyrood in 1128, either after a vision of a cross or to house a relic of the True Cross that had belonged to his mother, Saint Margaret. Kings began lodging in the abbey guesthouse, and by the later fifteenth century they had dedicated royal lodgings. Between 1501 and 1505 James IV built a Gothic palace beside the cloister, in time for his marriage to Margaret Tudor in the abbey in August 1503.

The English armies of the Earl of Hertford wrecked palace and abbey in 1544 and 1547; Cromwell's troops burned much of what was left in November 1650. What you walk through today is the reconstruction: Sir William Bruce, Surveyor General of the King's Works, and the master mason Robert Mylne began building in July 1671 and had the palace substantially finished by 1679. Bruce kept James V's sixteenth-century north-west tower and gave it a matching twin, which is why the west front has two turreted towers of different ages that look like a pair.

The building is a quadrangle roughly 230 feet square, covering 87,120 square feet of floor and containing 289 rooms. Seventeen of them are open to visitors.

A working residence, not a museum

The monarch spends one week a year here, known as Royal Week, and investitures, audiences, receptions and garden parties happen in the rooms you queue to see. When the King is in residence the site closes to visitors, the Scottish version of the Royal Standard flies instead of the Royal Banner of Scotland, and the Royal Company of Archers forms the bodyguard.

That is the honest reason this Palace is harder to plan than the fortress at the other end of the street. Public access is managed by the Royal Collection Trust, which publishes a closure list a season at a time; the building itself is maintained by Historic Environment Scotland on behalf of the Scottish Government. The Trust's own wording is that closures can happen at short notice. Check the date you intend to come before you fix anything else around it.

The single most common wasted journey in this part of Edinburgh is walking down the whole Royal Mile on a Tuesday. Out of season the Palace is normally closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays both, and the abbey ruins close with it, because they stand inside the grounds.

Which hour to take

The Trust publishes its own crowding advice, and it is unusually specific: the admission centre is busiest from opening and throughout the morning, and the official recommendation is to book in advance and arrive after 11:00. That is the opposite of the standing advice for the castle at the top of the street, where the early slot is the quiet one.

In winter, note the gap between the 16:30 closing time and the 15:15 last admission. A ticket bought for 15:00 in January gives you an hour and a half, and the multimedia guide alone runs about an hour. In summer the last admission at 16:30 against an 18:00 close is more comfortable.

The State Apartments and the King's Bedchamber

Bruce laid the first floor out as two suites of royal apartments: the Queen's Apartments in the west range, built for Catherine of Braganza, and the King's Apartments in the south and east, linked along the north by the Great Gallery. The King's Antechamber, Bedchamber and Closet run along the east side. The Bedchamber, at the centre of the east front, has the finest of the seventeenth-century plaster ceilings, with paintings of Hercules by Jacob de Wet II above it; the State Bed has stood in the palace since 1684.

The plasterwork throughout was done by the English plasterers John Houlbert and George Dunsterfield, the carpentry by the Dutchmen Alexander Eizat and Jan van Santvoort. The internal quadrangle carries the three classical orders stacked by importance — Doric for the service floor, Ionic for the State Apartments, Corinthian for the royal apartments above.

The Great Gallery: 96 portraits of kings, most of them invented

At 150 feet the Great Gallery is the largest room in the palace, running the whole north side from the King's Closet to the Queen's Lobby in James V's Tower. On its walls hang 96 of the original 111 portraits of Scottish monarchs, beginning with the legendary Fergus I, who is supposed to have ruled from 330 BC. Charles II commissioned the Dutch painter Jacob de Wet to paint the series, and he completed it between 1684 and 1686 — real kings and mythical ones given the same treatment, to argue for an unbroken Scottish royal line.

The room has been used for almost everything since: the election of Scotland's representative peers to the House of Lords until 1963, Bonnie Prince Charlie's balls in 1745, a barracks for the government troops who damaged the portraits in 1746, a Catholic chapel while the exiled Comte d'Artois lived here from 1796 to 1803, and the State Dining Room in the early twentieth century. It holds investitures and banquets today. In it stands the Tam o' Shanter Chair, made by John Underwood of Ayr from roof timbers of Alloway Auld Kirk and presented to George IV in 1822.

James V's Tower: Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Rizzio bloodstain

The second floor of the oldest tower holds the rooms Mary occupied from her return to Scotland in 1561 until her forced abdication in 1567. Her Outer Chamber is where she received visitors and where her famous audiences with John Knox took place. It is also where David Rizzio, her private secretary, was murdered on 9 March 1566: Darnley and several nobles came up the private stair from his apartments below, burst in on the queen at supper, dragged Rizzio through the bedchamber into the outer chamber and stabbed him to death — allegedly fifty-seven dagger wounds. The alleged bloodstain is pointed out on the floor where the body was left.

Treat that stain as a story rather than forensic evidence: no dating or analysis of it is published by the Royal Collection Trust, and a stain kept visible on a much-restored floor for four and a half centuries is a tradition, not a record. The room around it is real enough. The bedchamber's compartmented oak ceiling dates from Mary's own time and carries the monograms IR and MR — Jacobus Rex and Maria Regina, her parents James V and Mary of Guise. The Darnley Jewel, bought by Queen Victoria in 1842, and the Memorial to Lord Darnley are displayed here with other Stuart and Jacobite relics.

The abbey David I founded in 1128 became an important administrative centre: a papal legate was received here in 1177, the Parliament of Scotland met at it seven times between 1256 and 1410, and Robert the Bruce signed the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton in the King's Chamber in 1328. David II was buried here in 1371; James II was born, crowned, married and buried at Holyrood. James IV married Margaret Tudor in the abbey in 1503, Anne of Denmark was crowned in it in 1590, and Charles I was crowned in it in 1633.

What you see is a fragment. The choir and transepts were pulled down in 1570 after the Reformation, and the nave was kept as the parish church of the Canongate. James VII made the abbey the chapel of his new Order of the Thistle in 1687; an anti-Catholic mob destroyed its interior in December 1688. A £10m Royal Collection Trust project completed at the end of 2018 restored the abbey, grounds, forecourt and the Abbey Strand buildings, which now hold a learning centre.

The abbey closes when the palace closes

Because the ruins stand inside the palace grounds, every palace closure closes them: the Tuesdays and Wednesdays out of season, the 26 June to 3 July shutdown in 2026, and 24 to 26 December. The abbey had one closure of its own in 2026, on Monday 6 July, when the palace stayed open. There is no separate abbey ticket and no separate abbey entrance.

Advance is cheaper at every single tier, which is not true of every attraction in this city, and the gap is the same £4 whether you are an adult or a child. Dollar figures below are approximations at £1 = $1.36 and are never what you are charged.

• No family ticket figure is published by the Royal Collection Trust
• Your ticket converts free to a 1-Year Pass with unlimited re-admission — but a £2 transaction fee (about $3) applies each time you pre-book a return visit
• The Edwardians combined ticket, 17 June to 6 December 2026, takes 10% off both parts: £29.70 in advance (about $40) against £33.30 on the day (about $45)
• The Queen Elizabeth II Private Apartments Tour ran 21 May to 10 September 2026 at £71.00 in advance (about $97) — a date-limited product, not a standing option

Is a pass better value?

Only if you are doing all three royal sites in two days. The 48-hour Royal Edinburgh Ticket at £81 (about $110) covers this Palace, the fortress at the top of the Royal Mile and the royal yacht at Leith, plus unlimited hop-on hop-off on three bus routes. Bought separately at advance rates those three admissions come to £68.50 (about $93), which is £12.50 less than the pass — so what the extra £12.50 buys is the three bus routes and a guaranteed castle entry, not a discount on the entries.

The pass is also 48 hours from first use, and one weather day wastes it. The tickets hub sets it against the city passes, and the Edinburgh costs page works out what a fortnight of admissions comes to.

The address is Canongate, at the foot of the Royal Mile, EH8 8DX. Walking down the Mile from the castle takes about 25 minutes and is downhill the whole way; walking back up is the part people underestimate. The Scottish Parliament stands opposite the gates and Holyrood Park begins immediately behind, so the palace, Arthur's Seat and the Parliament are a single stop rather than three.

Two rules catch visitors out at the door. Photography and filming are not permitted anywhere inside the palace — the abbey and gardens are fine — and bags are checked on arrival. The multimedia guide is included in the ticket and runs about an hour; it exists in British Sign Language and with subtitles, and there is an audio-descriptive version for blind and partially sighted visitors.

• Access: largely accessible, with restrictions in Mary, Queen of Scots' rooms. AccessAble guides are published for the palace, café and shop
• Companion: disabled visitors pay the concessionary rate and a free access-companion ticket is bookable online
• Parking: accessible bays on Horse Wynd outside the palace, first come first served — there is no visitor car park
• Toilets: accessible toilets in the Café at the Palace, which you can enter without a ticket
• Seating: bench seating inside is limited; assistance dogs are welcome

By bus, and why not by tram

The trams do not come near the Old Town ridge — they run through the New Town — so the palace is reached on foot or by bus. A Lothian single is £2.40 (about $3.26), a City DAY ticket £6.00 (about $8.16), and tapping in and out with Tap Tap Cap caps the day at £5.70 (about $7.75). Plain contactless on board buys a single and does not cap, and cash fares must be the exact amount because drivers give no change.

The getting around page has the full fare table and the live service links.

They are not the same kind of visit and they do not compete for the same hour. The fortress at the top of the Mile is an outdoor site on a rock: a climb, a garrison, crowns and a gun, and you can spend three hours on it in the open air. Holyroodhouse is seventeen indoor rooms on a fixed route, done comfortably in an hour and a half with the abbey and gardens added, and it is the only place in the city where you stand in rooms a monarch used last summer.

Pick Holyroodhouse if the Stuarts, Mary, or state rooms with their furniture still in them are what you came for; pick the fortress if you want the view and the sweep of Scottish military history. If you have three days you will do both, and the guide post comparing them sets the two visits side by side on price, time and what you actually see.

One practical asymmetry decides it for a lot of people: the fortress opens every day except 25 and 26 December, and this palace does not. If your only free day is a Tuesday in November, the choice has been made for you.

Put it at the end of a morning, not the start of one. Walk the Royal Mile downhill from the castle rock, take one stop on the way, and arrive at the gates after 11:00 as the Trust suggests — the crowd at the admission centre has gone by then, and you finish beside Holyrood Park with the afternoon still ahead. From the forecourt you can be on the path up Arthur's Seat in two minutes, which is the cheapest and best second half of a day in this city.

The only hard constraint is the calendar. Check the closure list before you build a day around it, and if your date lands on a Tuesday or Wednesday outside high summer, move the palace rather than the rest of the day. The two-day itinerary schedules it for the second morning for exactly that reason, and the full list of things to do marks what stays open when it does not.