Our tours

The castle is the place where Scotland's story begins, and it rewards the company of someone who knows how to read its stones. Phil meets you at the esplanade and sets the scene before you step through the gate: the geology that made it defensible, the sieges that tested it, and the decisions made inside its walls that changed the course of British history. Once inside, you explore the Great Hall, the Scottish Crown Jewels, and the ancient Royal Palace at your own pace — with Phil's private audio guide in your ear — before meeting again for an hour of storytelling that draws the threads together. The tour continues down the Royal Mile, connecting what you've seen to the city below.

The Royal Mile looks like a tourist street. Beneath the surface it is one of the strangest and most layered pieces of urban fabric in Europe. Phil walks you through the closes and courtyards where plague, revolution and genius existed within yards of each other — the tenements that once housed ten families to a floor and the coffee houses where the Scottish Enlightenment was argued into being. This is Edinburgh for people who want to understand a city, not just photograph it.

In the 1760s, Edinburgh decided to reinvent itself. The New Town that emerged is one of the most ambitious pieces of urban planning in British history — a grid of wide streets, elegant squares and rational architecture built in deliberate contrast to the medieval chaos of the Old Town. Phil walks you through it with the eye of someone who understands the social ambitions behind the stone, ending at Dean Village: a mill settlement tucked into the Water of Leith that most visitors never find.

The National Gallery holds works that span seven centuries and range from Raphael and Rembrandt to Ramsay and Raeburn. Phil selects a thread — Scottish portraiture, the Romantic landscape, the Dutch masters — and walks you through it without overwhelming you. This is a gallery tour for people who find museum audio guides too slow and gallery labels too thin. You leave knowing a handful of things well rather than everything superficially.

The pub in Scotland is not simply a place to drink. It is where alliances were made, grievances aired, and reputations won or lost. Phil takes you to two or three of Edinburgh's oldest and most characterful establishments, using each one as the setting for a chapter of Scottish history. The stories run from the Jacobites to the Enlightenment philosophers who debated here, to the social reformers of the Victorian city. Drinks are your own; the history is included.

"Doon the Watter" — down the water — was the phrase Glasgow's working families used for their annual escape from the city to the resorts of the Firth of Clyde. Phil follows the same route: by train to one of the Victorian seaside towns that built themselves around the arrival of the Clyde steamers, then along a coastline of faded grandeur and remarkable beauty. This is a tour about industry, leisure and the Scottish relationship with the sea — and one of the least-known great day trips in Scotland.

Stirling sits at the narrowest crossing of the River Forth, which made it the most fought-over piece of ground in Scotland. Stirling Castle, the Wallace Monument, the field of Bannockburn — these are not separate attractions but chapters in the same argument about who Scotland was and what it chose to become. Phil holds the thread between them. The tour works as a half-day from Edinburgh, and can be combined with a ceilidh evening to make a complete Stirling experience.

Glasgow is the city most visitors to Scotland don't make time for, and the one they most often regret missing. It is louder, warmer and more surprising than Edinburgh, with a Victorian mercantile grandeur that rivals any city in Britain and an art collection — the Burrell, the Kelvingrove — of international significance. Phil takes you through the Merchant City, the West End and along the Clyde: Scotland's second story, told on its own terms and not as a footnote to the capital.