Dunbars Close

About this audio guide

This guide to Dunbars Close in Edinburgh traces the ground behind its wall from a working kitchen garden that fed a Canongate household through the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, to the writer David Dunbar whose name it carries, to the rubbish tip it became by the 1970s. A charity and landscape architect Seamus Filor later worked from a 1647 survey of the street to lay out the terraces you see now. Look for the espaliered fruit trained flat against the old stone wall.