All civic Edinburgh thus left behind, and a military portal having been passed, one entered the precincts of the Castle itself,—the high, rocky stronghold which was more ancient than anything recognisable as most ancient in the Edinburgh beneath, which indeed had fostered that Edinburgh into its first existence and growth, and in which there were relics of days older than those of Malcolm Canmore and David I., older than the infancy of Holyrood Abbey. After the long walk upwards between the two lines of close-packed houses, with perpetual mouths of mere wynds and closes for a whole mile, it was something to emerge into the open air, even in the battlemented exterior esplanade or courtyard of this Castle, slanting up the hillside to the moat and drawbridge. It was more to be allowed to pass the drawbridge and the other defences, and so to pursue the winding, rock-hewn track by which one mounted to the fortified aggregate of guard-houses, store-rooms, and royal towers, heaved together on the cliff-bound summit. What a platform then to stand on, beside the cannon, in any of the ledges of the embrasured parapet! The feeling for scenery, they say, had not been much developed in the sixteenth century; but no more in that century than in this could any human eye have gazed with indifference on the vast panorama of Scottish land and water that burst into the vision from Edinburgh’s Castle Rock. To the north there were villages and farmsteads dotting the range of fields towards the Firth which is now covered with the streets of the New Town, and beyond these always the unwearying loveliness of the face of the Firth, with the boundary of the Fifeshire hills; to the west, the near Corstorphines, and over these also a tract of varied country, fading away up the course of the Firth into a purple suggestion of Stirling and the first spurs of the Highlands; to the south, the Braids and the Pentlands, hiding the pastoral territory of the Esks and the Upper Tweed, with its sleepy stretch towards the Borders and England. Scores of castles and keeps, each the residence of some nobleman or laird of distinction, could be counted within this sweep of the eye, north, west, and south, over the immediate vicinity of Edinburgh. But, if one’s interest were still rather in the town itself, it was the eastward glance that would help most to complete and define the previous impressions. The whole sea-approach to Edinburgh by the Firth was now splendidly visible, with the already described curve of the hither coast from Berwick Law to Leith; the road from Leith to Holyrood was plainly discernible; and the Canongate and Edinburgh could be looked down upon together, and seen in connected shape and ground-plan.