Arthur's Seat

About a mile to the east of Edinburgh Castle, in the middle of the 650 acre Holyrood Park, a double mounded hill rises 251 meters above the city; in reality, it's all that remains of an extinct 350 million year old volcano, one that was smoothed and leveled a hundred and fifty or million years after its last gasp when a glacier swept down and across the volcano, leaving smaller clusters at the base of the dead volcano, and shaping it into the double mounds that today tower over the city and are known as Arthur's Seat.

Arthur's seat is a popular and fairly easy climb, particularly if you approach from the east, up along the gentle but inevitable rise above Dunsapie Loch. The material moved aside by the glacier ended up forming the sharp craggy outcrops known as the Salisbury Crags, between the city of Edinburgh and Arthur's Seat. The story behind the name is a little obscure; popular opinion holds that it is in fact the site of one of King Arthur's "seats," that is, a military fortification. In fact there are several ruined ancient hill forts in the general vicinity, the best preserved is a tumbled vaguely fort-like mound of stone above the Dunsapie Loch, and even clearer traces of neatly arrayed cultivation terraces rising up along the eastern end of Arthur's Seat. They are, however, almost certainly pre-Roman Celtic remnants, most likely built and defended by the local Celtic tribe, the Votadini.

The Votadini's descendants, and a more reasonable source for the association of the hill with Arthur, were the people celebrated in Old Welsh in the epic poem Y Goddin, as first the Guotodin, and later, as Old Welsh mutated and became Middle Welsh, the Gododdin (that dd is a th sound; go-DOE-thin). They are also referred to as the "Strathclyde Welsh," since even before the Romans arrived, they fled their native lands in Wales for this area of Scotland. There they engaged in feuds and wars, some of them the sixth century battle of Catraeth celebrated in Y Goddin, against Germanic speaking Angles. Y Gododdin's stanza 99 praises one of the warriors, one Gwawrddur, and says of him that:

He fed black ravens on the rampart of a fortress

Though he was no Arthur

Among the powerful ones in battle

In the front rank, Gwawrddur was a palisade

Which has led some to assert that the hill fort on the summit of Arthur's Seat is the fortress referred to in the poem, without, admittedly, a great deal of evidence. Another likely explanation is that the Gaelic name Ard-na-Said has been corrupted by English-speaking Sassenachs as "Arthur's Seat," when in reality it is a Gaelic phrase meaning "Hill of the Arrows," a reference to the hill fort remains at the top of the summit. Either way, it is well worth the hike to the summit, which, on a clear day, is one of the best views in Scotland, surrounded by protected natural landscape (aside from the odd abbey and palace) that is the private property of the Queen, but open to the public.