Edinburgh Trivia
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46 free Edinburgh trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
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Q 01Edinburgh's huge New Year street party goes by which Scots name?
Hogmanay
Hogmanay, the Scots word for the last day of the year, drew more than 300,000 revellers to the city in 1996, which led the organisers to limit numbers and make the street party ticketed.
Q 02Edinburgh's nickname 'Auld Reekie' is Scots for what?
Old Smoky
'Auld Reekie' means 'Old Smoky', after the chimney smoke that hung over the Old Town; in one old story a Fife laird sent his children to bed when he saw the city 'putting on her nightcap'.
Q 03For its neoclassical New Town and reputation for learning, Edinburgh has been called the 'Athens of' where?
The North
The North: Calton Hill's National Monument was modelled on the Parthenon, but the money ran out in 1829 and it has stood unfinished ever since, earning the nickname 'Edinburgh's Disgrace'.
Q 04Which New Zealand city was named after the Gaelic form of Edinburgh's name?
Dunedin
Dunedin comes from Dùn Èideann, the Gaelic name for Edinburgh; its surveyor was told to copy the character of the Scottish capital, and the city is still nicknamed the Edinburgh of the South.
Q 05Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Bell was the real-life model for which fictional detective?
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes: Bell would bring in out-patients he had never met and deduce their occupation and recent activities by observation alone, a method his student Arthur Conan Doyle gave to his detective.
Q 06What forced 17th-century Edinburgh to build tenements eleven storeys high?
Its defensive walls
Its defensive walls still marked the city's limits, so a growing population could only build upwards; the eleven-storey tenements that resulted have been called forerunners of the skyscraper.
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 08Which measure of 1707 closed the Scottish Parliament that had sat in Edinburgh?
The Acts of Union
The Acts of Union merged the Scottish and English parliaments into one Parliament of Great Britain at Westminster from 1 May 1707; Edinburgh went without a parliament until devolution in 1999.
Q 09Which Enlightenment thinkers were familiar figures on Edinburgh's streets in the 18th century?
Hume and Adam Smith
Hume and Adam Smith both lived in the city; Smith, the great champion of free trade, spent his last twelve years there working as a commissioner of customs.
Q 10Edinburgh's Princes Street was to be called St Giles Street until which king objected to the name?
George III
George III linked the name St Giles with a notorious London slum, so the planners dropped the city's patron saint and renamed the street to honour the king's own family instead.
Q 11In 2004 Edinburgh became the world's first UNESCO City of what?
Literature
Literature: UNESCO made Edinburgh its first City of Literature in 2004 after a pitch in Paris at which the city's poet laureate read a poem written for the occasion.
Q 12Which building is regarded as the oldest in Edinburgh, standing inside the castle?
St Margaret's Chapel
St Margaret's Chapel, built about 1130 by Queen Margaret's son, was later used as a gunpowder store, and its origins lay forgotten until an antiquary rediscovered them in 1845.
Q 13Edinburgh Castle's One O'Clock Gun has been fired in anger only once, at what target in 1916?
A German Zeppelin
Q 21Which twin brothers, born in Edinburgh in 1962, had a worldwide hit with 'I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)'?
The Proclaimers
The Proclaimers, Craig and Charlie Reid, released the song in 1988, but it only reached the American top three five years later, after it featured in the film Benny & Joon.
Q 22The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo is staged each August at which location?
The Castle Esplanade
The Castle Esplanade was laid out as a parade ground in 1753, so massed pipes and drums suit it; a forerunner show played the Ross Bandstand in 1949 before the first Tattoo took the Esplanade in 1950.
Q 23Which Irvine Welsh novel, filmed in 1996, follows a group of heroin users in Edinburgh?
Trainspotting
A German Zeppelin raided the city on 2 April 1916 and the gun fired at it in vain; the daily shot began in 1861 so that ships could set their clocks even when fog hid the time ball on the Nelson Monument.
Q 14Which medieval siege gun, a gift to King James II, is displayed at Edinburgh Castle?
Mons Meg
Mons Meg, made at Mons in what is now Belgium, could hurl a gunstone about two miles; after her barrel burst she spent 75 years in England before a triumphant return in 1829.
Q 15Which treasure left Westminster for Edinburgh Castle in 1996?
The Stone of Scone
The Stone of Scone, used in coronations for centuries, was briefly taken back on Christmas Day 1950, when four Scottish students broke into Westminster Abbey; since 2024 it has been on show in Perth Museum.
Q 16What did the novelist Walter Scott find in a locked chest in Edinburgh Castle in 1818?
The crown jewels
The crown jewels of Scotland were sealed away in 1707; Scott's party broke into the Crown Room half expecting an empty chest and found the crown, sceptre and sword still wrapped in linen.
Q 17Which street runs downhill from Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse?
The Royal Mile
The Royal Mile, almost exactly a mile long, follows a ridge of rock left in the lee of the castle crag by an Ice Age glacier, which is why the old closes fall away so steeply on either side.
Q 18Arthur's Seat, the peak of Holyrood Park, is the remains of what?
An extinct volcano
An extinct volcano: Arthur's Seat erupted in the Carboniferous, roughly 340 million years ago, and an Ice Age glacier later scraped it into the crags and sloping tail seen today.
Q 19In 1836 boys on Arthur's Seat found 17 miniature what, each holding a carved figure?
Coffins
Coffins: nobody knows who hid them, though one theory ties the seventeen to the victims of the murderers Burke and Hare; the eight that survive are in the National Museum of Scotland.
Q 20Which famous reference work was first published in Edinburgh, from 1768?
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica began in Edinburgh in 1768, moved its publication to the United States in 1901, and printed its last paper edition in 2010 before going online only.
Trainspotting, Welsh's 1993 debut, is written largely in Scots; it was longlisted for the Booker Prize but reportedly kept off the shortlist after offending two of the judges.
Q 24What happened to Scott Monument architect George Meikle Kemp before it was finished?
He drowned in the Union Canal
He drowned in the Union Canal walking home in March 1844; Kemp, a self-taught joiner, had entered the design contest under the name of a medieval master mason, fearing his lack of qualifications would count against him.
Q 25Greyfriars Bobby, the terrier whose statue draws visitors in Edinburgh, reputedly spent 14 years doing what?
Guarding his master's grave
Guarding his master's grave: the terrier is said to have kept watch over John Gray's plot in Greyfriars Kirkyard until 1872, and in 1867 the Lord Provost paid for his licence and gave him a collar.
Q 26Which Edinburgh councillor, respectable by day and burglar by night, inspired Jekyll and Hyde?
Deacon Brodie
Deacon Brodie, a cabinet-maker who copied his clients' keys in wax to rob them by night, was hanged in 1788; Stevenson, whose father owned furniture made by Brodie, turned the double life into Jekyll and Hyde.
Q 27Which 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 arrived as a single mother living on benefits and often wrote in cafés, including one part-owned by her brother-in-law; Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone came out in 1997.
Q 28Which James Bond actor grew up in Edinburgh, where his first job was as a milkman?
Sean Connery
Sean Connery was born in Fountainbridge in 1930 and delivered milk for St Cuthbert's Co-operative Society; three decades later he became the first big-screen Bond in Dr. No.
Q 29Edinburgh's two big football clubs are known locally as Hearts and what?
Hibs
Hibs are Hibernian, founded in 1875 by Irishmen living in the Cowgate and named after Hibernia, the Roman name for Ireland; their meetings with Hearts make up the Edinburgh derby.
Q 30Which Edinburgh stadium, the largest in Scotland, is the home of Scottish rugby?
Murrayfield
Murrayfield holds just over 67,000, more than any other stadium in Scotland; it opened on 21 March 1925 with a win over England that completed a Scottish Grand Slam.