Pentland Hills Regional Park H.Q.

This guide to the Pentland Hills Regional Park headquarters in Edinburgh traces the building's layered past: a seventeenth-century doocot built to feed a household through winter, and the castellated Georgian mansion an Edinburgh lawyer commissioned beside it in the 1770s. You'll hear about the Gordon family who held the estate for generations, the marble fireplaces and piped water that set the house apart, and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who later lived there. Look for the old ice house as you walk the grounds near the glen.