High Street, Edinburgh
Coordinates: 55°57′02″N 3°11′08″W / 55.95056°N 3.18556°W
The Royal Mile (Scots: Ryal Mile) is the name given to a succession of streets forming the main thoroughfare of the Old Town of the city of Edinburgh in Scotland. The name was first used in W M Gilbert's Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century (1901), and was further popularised as the title of a guidebook, published in 1920.
The thoroughfare is, as the name suggests, approximately one Scots mile long and runs downhill between two significant locations in the history of Scotland, namely Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Palace. The streets which make up the Royal Mile are (west to east) Castlehill, the Lawnmarket, the High Street, the Canongate and Abbey Strand. The Royal Mile is the busiest tourist street in the Old Town, rivalled only by Princes Street in the New Town.
Retreating ice sheets, many millennia ago, deposited their glacial debris behind the hard volcanic plug of the castle rock on which Edinburgh Castle stands, resulting in a distinctive crag and tail formation. Running eastwards from the crag (i.e. the castle rock), the Royal Mile sits upon the ridge of the tail which slopes gently down to Holyrood Palace. Steep closes (or alleyways) run between the many tall lands (or tenement buildings) off the main thoroughfare. The route runs from an elevation of 42 meters above sea level at the palace, to 109 meters at the castle, for an average gradient of 4.1%.
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