Edinburgh Castle Tickets in Scotland

Of everything on display inside Edinburgh Castle, the Honours of Scotland are the room that stops people in the doorway. Tucked into the Royal Palace on Crown Square — a small, hushed chamber after the broad sky of the Esplanade — the Crown, the Sceptre and the Sword of State sit together behind glass, the oldest crown jewels in the British Isles. The Crown dates from 1540 and was made for James V; the Sceptre is a gift from Pope Alexander VI in 1494; the Sword of State was sent from Pope Julius II in 1507. Together they were first used at the coronation of the nine-month-old Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1543. Hidden under a church floor in Kinross during Cromwell's invasion, lost again under the Treaty of Union in 1707, they were rediscovered in 1818 by Walter Scott inside a sealed oak chest in the very room you now stand in.

Alongside them, until its move to Perth Museum in 2024, sat the Stone of Destiny — the sandstone block on which Scottish monarchs were crowned for centuries, returned to Scotland in 1996 after 700 years in Westminster Abbey beneath the English coronation chair. Outside, the Great Hall of James IV with its medieval hammerbeam roof, the 15th-century siege gun Mons Meg, and St Margaret's Chapel of 1130 — the oldest building in Edinburgh — together make the route through this castle one of the densest stretches of royal history anywhere in Europe.