Edinburgh Trivia
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49 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 49 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 Firth of Forth, the estuary of the River Forth, bounds Edinburgh to the north; the city's port of Leith sits on its southern shore.
Q 02Edinburgh's nickname 'Auld Reekie' is Scots for what?
Old Smoky
'Auld Reekie' means 'Old Smoky': the nickname came from the pall of coal smoke that hung over the Old Town, visible from across the Forth in Fife.
Q 03For its neoclassical New Town and reputation for learning, Edinburgh has been called the 'Athens of' where?
The North
Edinburgh is the 'Athens of the North': Calton Hill's unfinished National Monument, begun in 1826, directly copies the Parthenon, and the Enlightenment gave the city its scholarly fame.
Q 04The 'Edin' in Edinburgh derives from Eidyn, a name from which ancient language?
Cumbric
Eidyn is Cumbric, the Brittonic language of the Gododdin who held Lothian; Old English 'burh' later replaced the Brittonic 'din' (fort), and Gaelic keeps the name as Dùn Èideann.
Q 05Which king founded the royal burgh of Edinburgh in the early 12th century?
David I
David I, who reigned 1124–53, made Edinburgh a royal burgh; his charter of about 1124–27 grants 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
Hemmed in by the walls, some Old Town tenements reached eleven storeys or more and have been called 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
Created by an act of 1611 to keep order in the crowded burgh, the High Constables of Edinburgh are thought to be the world's oldest statutory police force; they survive as a ceremonial body.
Q 08The Acts of Union of 1706–07 merged the Scottish and English legislatures into which new body?
The Parliament of Great Britain
The Acts of Union created the Parliament of Great Britain at Westminster from 1 May 1707; the union provoked riots in Edinburgh, and 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
David Hume and Adam Smith lived and worked in Edinburgh alongside James Hutton and Joseph Black; Smollett's Humphry Clinker (1771) 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
The Town Council launched the New Town design competition in 1766; James Craig's winning plan named streets to flatter the Hanoverians — George, Queen, Hanover, Frederick and Princes — with Rose and Thistle for the union.
Q 11Princes Street in the New Town was named in honour of whom?
George III's two sons
Princes Street honours George III's two sons, the future George IV and Frederick, Duke of York; the council chose loyal Hanoverian names to proclaim allegiance 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
UNESCO inscribed the Old and New Towns of Edinburgh in 1995; the site takes in Dean Village and Calton Hill, and Edinburgh World Heritage has managed it since 1999.
Q 13Which building is regarded as the oldest in Edinburgh, standing inside the castle?
St Margaret's Chapel
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
St Margaret's Chapel, built by David I about 1130 in memory of his mother, is the oldest surviving building in Edinburgh; Queen Margaret had died at the castle in 1093.
Q 14The castle's One O'Clock Gun has been fired in anger only once, at what target in 1916?
A German Zeppelin
The gun's only shot in anger was at a German Zeppelin during the raid of 2 April 1916; the daily time signal has been fired from an L118 Light Gun on Mills Mount Battery since 2001.
Q 15Which giant 15th-century bombard was delivered to Edinburgh Castle in 1457?
Mons Meg
Mons Meg, a bombard cast at Mons in 1449, was a gift from Philip the Good of Burgundy to James II in 1457; the castle's first known gun purchase dates from 1384.
Q 16In which year was the Stone of Scone returned to Scotland and placed in Edinburgh Castle's Crown Room?
1996
The Stone of Scone returned on 30 November 1996, seven centuries after Edward I took it, and was placed beside the Honours of Scotland in the Crown Room; it moved to Perth Museum in 2024.
Q 17Who was permitted in 1818 to search the castle for the Crown of Scotland, lost since 1707?
Walter Scott
Walter Scott obtained the Prince Regent's warrant in 1818, had the sealed Crown Room opened and found the Honours of Scotland in a locked chest; they went on show for a shilling a head.
Q 18The Royal Mile runs downhill from Edinburgh Castle to which building?
Holyrood Palace
The Royal Mile ends at Holyrood Palace, the Palace of Holyroodhouse; roughly a Scots mile long, it is 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
Arthur's Seat is an extinct volcano, active about 340 million years ago in the Carboniferous; 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
Arthur's Seat's summit stands about 250 metres (251 m, 822 ft) above sea level; the easiest ascent is from the east above Dunsapie Loch, and rock climbing on Salisbury Crags was banned in 2019.
The Fringe is the world's largest performing arts festival; combined with the International Festival it has been called the third-largest ticketed event in the world, after the Olympics and the World Cup.
Q 24The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo is staged each August on what?
The Castle Esplanade
The Tattoo is staged on the Castle Esplanade, where massed pipe bands and military bands from around the world perform; it began in 1950 and has been televised worldwide.
Q 25The Scott Monument is the world's second-largest memorial to a writer after one honouring whom?
José Martí in Havana
Only the José Martí memorial in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución is larger; the Scott Monument, completed in 1844, has a 61-metre Gothic spire climbed by 287 steps.
Q 26What happened to Scott Monument architect George Meikle Kemp before it was finished?
He drowned in the Union Canal
Kemp drowned in the Union Canal after falling in while walking home on a foggy night in March 1844; his son Thomas placed the monument's 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
Deacon William Brodie, a cabinet-maker and councillor hanged in 1788 for burglary, inspired Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Burke and Hare, who sold 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
J. K. Rowling moved to Edinburgh in December 1993 and wrote much of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in the city's cafés, including Nicolson's; the book was published in 1997.
Q 30Which Edinburgh-born actor was the first cinematic James Bond?
Sean Connery
Sean Connery, born in Fountainbridge in 1930, first played Bond in Dr. No (1962); Alastair Sim, Ronnie Corbett and Rory Bremner were also born in the city.