Royal Mile

Where it sits. The Royal Mile is the spine of Edinburgh's Old Town: a single descending street, about a mile and a hundred yards long, running east from the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle to the gates of the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Its shape is geology. The castle sits on the plug of an extinct volcano; a glacier moving east scoured around the hard basalt and left a tapering ramp of softer rock in its lee. Medieval Edinburgh built along the crest of that ramp, which is why the street falls steadily for its whole length and why the closes running off it drop away so steeply on both sides. Under five different names — Castlehill, Lawnmarket, High Street, Canongate and Abbey Strand — it passes St Giles' Cathedral, the Mercat Cross, the Scottish Parliament and roughly seventy narrow entries into courtyards behind.

The story behind it. Hemmed by the Nor Loch to the north and the town wall to the south, the burgh could not spread sideways, so it grew upward. By the seventeenth century tenements of eight, ten and even fourteen storeys stood along the ridge, among the tallest residential buildings in Europe at the time, with lawyers, merchants and porters stacked in the same stair. The Lawnmarket takes its name from the linen market chartered here in 1477; the brass setts marking the Heart of Midlothian outside St Giles' show where the Old Tolbooth prison stood until 1817, and passers-by still spit on it. When the New Town drained the loch and drew the wealthy north after 1767, the Old Town became a slum of subdivided mansions, which is one reason so much of the seventeenth-century fabric survived to be restored: nobody had the money to knock it down. Below street level, Mary King's Close and other buried lanes were sealed under the Royal Exchange of 1753 and can now be walked.

On screen. In February and March 2017 the street became Marvel's Scotland. Additional photography for Avengers: Infinity War ran in Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Highlands, with studio work at Wardpark Studios in Cumbernauld, and the Old Town supplied the setting for the sequence in which Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive ambush Wanda Maximoff and Vision to take the Mind Stone from Vision's forehead. Steep, granite-setted Cockburn Street, which curls off the High Street towards Waverley, was dressed and closed for night shooting; shop fronts were re-signed, and the production's own vehicles were mixed with Edinburgh buses. The fight itself is a hybrid — real street geometry, stage-built interiors and a great deal of digital work, since none of the combatants could actually be thrown through a Georgian shopfront. Editing then carries the action into a railway station that reads unmistakably as Edinburgh Waverley, a few dozen metres downhill from where the street material was shot. The Old Town has done similar duty for Cloud Atlas, whose 2011 Scottish shoot used sets in and near Edinburgh and Glasgow, and for Avengers production crews the appeal was blunt: a real European city centre that has barely changed shape since the 1700s.

What you actually see today. Walking downhill from the esplanade you pass the Camera Obscura and Scotch Whisky Experience at Castlehill, then the Lawnmarket with Gladstone's Land — a six-storey merchant's house of the 1620s with painted ceilings, kept by the National Trust for Scotland — and Riddle's Court behind it. St Giles' has the Thistle Chapel of 1911, a small riot of carved oak. Past the Tron Kirk the street becomes the Canongate, quieter and lower, with Canongate Kirk of 1691 and its graveyard, John Knox House with its projecting timber gallery, and finally the Scottish Parliament of 2004 by Enric Miralles facing Holyrood. The closes are the point: Advocate's Close, Anchor Close and Bakehouse Close all deliver sudden views to the New Town or the crags.

Getting there and timing. Waverley station sits at the foot of the ridge; the Market Street exit and the Waverley Steps put you on the High Street in five minutes. Trams from the airport stop at St Andrew Square, ten minutes' walk north. In August the Fringe turns the High Street into a slow-moving crush from late morning to midnight, and hotel rates roughly double; May, June and the second half of September give the same light with a fraction of the density. Early morning, before about eight, is the only reliable window for photographs without people, and the low sun then runs straight up the street from the east.