Balmoral Hotel and Calton Hill from Mound

byronv2 has added a photo to the pool:

Balmoral Hotel and Calton Hill from the Mound at dusk. Balmoral Hotel started life in 1902 (very new by Edinburgh standards!) as the North British Hotel, standing right above the main railway station which runs through the valley between the Old and New Towns, one of the classic grand old railway hotels which were once much more common through Britain in the late 1800s and early 1900s when travel by train was a more luxurious affair - imagine being powered by the Flying Scotsman locomotive steaming its way up the east coast of the British Isles all the way from London to arrive in Edinburgh's Waverley Station then stroll right into your luxury hotel. Now that was travelling... It was renamed the Balmoral in the 80s (despite being nowhere near Balmoral!) after a refurbishment, a very posh, very expensive hotel with views out towards the Castle.

In the right background you can see Calton Hill, another of Edinburgh's many hills. The tall tower on it is the Nelson Monument, shaped like a mariner's telescope. The Classical pillared structure next to it is the National Monument, another landmark to commemorate the Napoleonic wars, a reproduction of the Parthenon, except they ran out of money and it was never completed. Over the last almost two centuries there have been several moves by groups to raise funds and finally complete it, but I doubt it ever will be and most of us prefer it as it is now, it is part of the city like that.

Calton Hill is also one of the finest spots from which to view Edinburgh, looking right down Princes Street past the Balmoral, out towards the Castle, the Old Town, you can see Arthur's Seat from it, the Palace of Holyrood and the modern Parliament, turn round full east and you can follow the Firth of Forth where the estuary opens out to such a massive, yawning maw of flowing river that you can't tell where it ends and the sea begins; on a good day you can even see down the coast to the distinctive almost pyramidal shaped hill of North Berwick Law.

In Picturesque Notes the great Edinburgh author Robert Louis Stevenson himself extolled the virtues of promenading on Calton Hill and taking in the 360 degree vistas it offers over city, river, sea and surrounding countryside (and who are we to argue with RLS?):

"Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is perhaps the best; since you can see the Castle, which you lose from the Castle, and Arthur's Seat, which you cannot see from Arthur's Seat. It is the place to stroll on one of those days of sunshine and east wind which are so common in our more than temperate summer. The breeze comes off the sea, with a little of the freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar to the quarter, which is delightful to certain very ruddy organizations and greatly the reverse to the majority of mankind. It brings with it a faint, floating haze, a cunning decolourizer, although not thick enough to obscure outlines near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to windward at the far end of Musselburgh Bay; and over the Links of Aberlady and Berwick Law and the hump of the Bass Rock it assumes the aspect of a bank of thin sea fog. "