50 free Edinburgh trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Edinburgh is a capital built on seven hills and one extinct volcano, and it has more nicknames than most cities have hills. This quiz explains Auld Reekie and the Athens of the North, then covers the history: David I's burgh, eleven-storey tenements, the 1611 police force, the Union of 1707, Cromwell and the Jacobites, the Enlightenment of Hume and Smith, and the New Town streets named to flatter George III. Then the sights: St Margaret's Chapel and the One O'Clock Gun's only shot in anger, Mons Meg, the Stone of Scone, Walter Scott finding the lost crown, the Royal Mile, Arthur's Seat, the Scott Monument and its drowned architect, Greyfriars Bobby, Deacon Brodie, the Forth Bridge, Miralles's parliament and its £414 million bill, Britannia at Leith and Dolly the sheep. The Fringe, the Tattoo, Hogmanay, Hearts and Hibs, Murrayfield, Waverley and the haar round it out. Easy questions ask which firth borders the city and who wrote Harry Potter in its cafés; hard ones want the language behind 'Edin' and the naturalist who first compared it to Athens. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city and its landmarks, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Try our Scotland and Harry Potter quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Edinburgh is bounded on its seaward side by which body of water?
The Firth of Forth
The Pentland Hills close it off to the south; with about 506,000 people it is Scotland's second city after Glasgow.
Q 02Edinburgh's nickname 'Auld Reekie' is Scots for what?
Old Smoky
Country people named it for the cloud of coal smoke over the Old Town; a Fife laird reputedly sent his children to bed when he saw it 'putting on her nicht-cap'.
Q 03For its neoclassical New Town and reputation for learning, Edinburgh has been called the 'Athens of' where?
The North
Calton Hill's unfinished National Monument directly copies the Parthenon; Tom Stoppard's Archie suggested 'Reykjavík of the South' would fit better.
Q 04The 'Edin' in Edinburgh derives from Eidyn, a name from which ancient language?
Cumbric
The Brittonic 'din' (hillfort) was later replaced by the Old English 'burh'; in Gaelic the city is Dùn Èideann.
Q 05Which king founded the royal burgh of Edinburgh in the early 12th century?
David I
The first written evidence is a charter of about 1124–27 granting land in 'burgo meo de Edenesburg' to Dunfermline Priory.
Q 06Edinburgh's 17th-century tenements, hemmed in by the town walls, rose to how many storeys?
Eleven or more
They have been described as forerunners of the skyscraper; most were replaced by the Victorian buildings of today's Old Town.
Q 07The High Constables of Edinburgh, created by an act of 1611, are thought to be the world's oldest what?
Statutory police force
They were set up to keep order in the crowded burgh.
Q 08The Acts of Union of 1706–07 merged the Scottish and English legislatures into which new body?
The Parliament of Great Britain
The Union took effect on 1 May 1707 and provoked riots in Edinburgh; a devolved Scottish Parliament returned only in 1999.
Q 09Which Enlightenment thinkers were familiar figures on Edinburgh's streets in the late 18th century?
Hume and Adam Smith
James Hutton and Joseph Black were part of the same circle; Smollett's Humphry Clinker called the city a 'hotbed of genius'.
Q 10The New Town's geometric street plan came from a Town Council competition in which year?
1766
Its streets were named to flatter the Hanoverians: George, Queen, Hanover, Frederick and Princes Street, plus Rose and Thistle for the union.
Q 11Princes Street in the New Town was named in honour of whom?
George III's two sons
The council chose the names to proclaim loyalty to George III after the Jacobite rising of 1745.
Q 12Edinburgh's Old and New Towns were jointly listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in which year?
1995
The listing includes Dean Village and Calton Hill; Edinburgh World Heritage has managed the site since 1999.
Q 13Which building is regarded as the oldest in Edinburgh, standing inside the castle?
St Margaret's Chapel
It dates from the early 12th century; a royal castle has stood on the rock since Malcolm III's reign.
Q 21The Edinburgh Fringe began in 1947 as what?
An unofficial offshoot of the official event
Eight uninvited companies turned up alongside the official festival, giving the world the term 'fringe theatre'.
Q 22Which principle governs entry to the Fringe?
It is open-access, so anyone may perform
In 2025 it sold more than 2.6 million tickets across 53,942 performances of 3,893 shows in 301 venues.
Q 23The Fringe is described as the world's largest what?
Performing arts festival
Q 14The castle's One O'Clock Gun has been fired in anger only once, at what target in 1916?
A German Zeppelin
The daily time signal is now fired from an L118 Light Gun on Mills Mount Battery.
Q 15Which giant 15th-century bombard was delivered to Edinburgh Castle in 1457?
Mons Meg
The castle's first known gun purchase was in 1384; the fortress has served as arsenal, mint, prison, archive and treasury.
Q 16In which year was the Stone of Scone returned to Scotland and placed in Edinburgh Castle's Crown Room?
1996
It sits beside the Honours of Scotland, rediscovered in a locked chest in 1818 after they had been thought lost since 1707.
Q 17Who was permitted in 1818 to search the castle for the Crown of Scotland, lost since 1707?
Walter Scott
He broke into a sealed room, unlocked a chest and found the Honours of Scotland, which went on show for a shilling a head.
Q 18The Royal Mile runs downhill from Edinburgh Castle to which building?
Holyrood Palace
It is almost exactly a mile long and made up of the Esplanade, Castlehill, the Lawnmarket, the High Street, the Canongate and Abbey Strand.
Q 19Arthur's Seat, the peak of Holyrood Park, is the remains of what?
An extinct volcano
It rises 250.5 metres a mile east of the castle; Stevenson called it 'a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design'.
Q 20How high does Arthur's Seat rise above the city?
250 metres
The easiest ascent is from the east above Dunsapie Loch; climbing on Salisbury Crags was banned in 2019.
Combined with the International Festival it is said to be surpassed only by the Olympics and the World Cup as a ticketed event.
Q 24The Edinburgh Military Tattoo is staged every night for three weeks each August on what?
The Castle Esplanade
Massed pipe bands and military bands from around the world take part.
Q 25The Scott Monument is the world's second-largest memorial to a writer after one honouring whom?
José Martí in Havana
Its 61-metre Gothic spire is climbed by 287 steps; nearby Waverley Station is named after Scott's novels.
Q 26What happened to Scott Monument architect George Meikle Kemp before it was finished?
He drowned in the Union Canal
He fell into the canal walking home on a foggy night in March 1844; his son placed the finial that August.
Q 27Greyfriars Bobby, whose statue draws visitors, reputedly spent 14 years doing what?
Guarding his master's grave
The Skye Terrier's owner, nightwatchman John Gray, was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard; the Lord Provost paid for the dog's licence in 1867.
Q 28Which Edinburgh councillor, respectable by day and burglar by night, inspired Jekyll and Hyde?
Deacon Brodie
Burke and Hare, who sold fresh corpses to the anatomist Robert Knox, are the city's other notorious criminals.
Q 29Which author moved to Edinburgh in 1993 and wrote much of her first book in the city's coffee shops?
J. K. Rowling
Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus lives in Marchmont, and Muriel Spark's Miss Jean Brodie was set in Morningside.
Q 30Which Edinburgh-born actor was the first cinematic James Bond?
Sean Connery
Alastair Sim, Ronnie Corbett and Rory Bremner were also born in the city.