Where Princes Street Gardens are now, the Nor' Loch was 'a receptacle of many sewers, and seemingly of the worried cats, drowned dogs, and blackguardism of the city'. Initially stones and planks were laid across its swampland by a tailor with a shop in the Old Town and clients in the New. This gave rise to the name Geordie Boyd's Mud Brig. In time the 'Brig' was filled in by rubble from the excavation works – some two million cartloads tipped out by contractors and private citizens – finally forming a great earthen mound, known now simply as The Mound. 

Gracefully occupying the hollow immediately below the Mound is the National Gallery of Scotland, designed by one of Edinburgh's most famous architects William Playfair. It breathes contentment with its honey-coloured sandstone, plain pilasters and a crowning balustrade. Between it and Princes Street are the handsome fluted columns of the Doric temple that is the Royal Scottish Academy, surmounted by two sphinxes. All the harmony of great architecture, and the Mound a perfect vantage-point. Strange to think, looking at these elegant galleries, the quintessence of classical Edinburgh, that they were erected on landfill, next to a swamp, on wooden foundations. 

It was not initially intended to develop the rest of the ground reclaimed from the swamp, and in its early days it was a site for caravans and wild beast shows. But inevitably attempts were soon made to capitalise on the available space. The issue has smouldered ever since, and any changes to the gardens now require specific parliamentary approval. The gardens are also the setting for Edinburgh's main railway station, probably the only one in the world to be named after a novel - Sir Walter Scott's Waverley.

On the skyline as you descend the Mound are the spires of St. Mary's Cathedral, then the silhouette of the New Town stretching east toward the Calton Hill. Opposite the entrance to the station, for all the world like a Gothic space-rocket, is one of Edinburgh's best-loved monuments – and the world's largest to a writer. It incorporates figures of three Scottish monarchs, 16 poets and 64 of Scott's fictional characters. Under its picturesque canopy the 'Wizard of the North' himself sits, wearing a shepherd's plaid, his deer-hound Maida by his side. The visiting Charlotte Brontë wrote: 'Do not think I blaspheme when I tell you that your great London, as compared to Dun-Edin, 'mine own romantic town', is as prose compared to poetry. You have nothing like Scott's monument, or if you had... you have nothing like Arthur's Seat, and above all you have not the Scottish national character; and it is that grand character after all which gives the land its true charm, its true greatness.'

Scott popularised the romantic figure of the Highland Scot. He also rediscovered the lost royal regalia of Scotland - the crown and sceptre - sensing in himself a constant tug between the romantic and the realist. After great success as a poet, Scott turned to fiction, and effectively invented the historical novel; exerting a massive influence on European literature, and changing our awareness of our own past.

Queen Victoria's statue on the Royal Scottish Academy at the foot of the Mound looks due north up Hanover Street to one of George IV, fortunately not clad with the pink silk trousers he wore under his kilt on the Royal Visit of 1822. This pageant was theatrically staged by Scott, and led to tartanry becoming all the rage. After drinking a cherry brandy the King had offered him, the romantic in Scott begged the glass the King had drunk from, as a souvenir. On reaching home, forgetting it was in his pocket, he promptly sat on it.

This material was commissioned and produced by Edinburgh World Heritage and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust, with support from the Scottish Arts Council.  The scripts were written by Edinburgh poet and author, Stewart Conn, and performed by Shonagh Price and Donald Smith, with additional editorial material by Donald Smith.

All material is copyright Edinburgh World Heritage and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust unless otherwise stated.