Dalkeith

Gastropubs and Traditional Drinking

Just south of the town, where the road crosses the Esk at Lothian Bridge, the Sun Inn puts Loch Fyne oysters on the same menu as haddock and chips. It is a gastropub with rooms that has previously been named AA Pub of the Year and Scottish Gastropub of the Year, and it builds its cooking around Scottish produce: Borders lamb rump with a boxty potato pancake, celeriac puree and Hornig's haggis; mussels; a tomato soup people come back for; sticky toffee pudding. It can be very busy. There is high tea as well as lunch and dinner, and the vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options are worked through properly rather than tacked on.

In the town itself the drinking is more traditional. The Black Bull has an ornate exterior and a bar to match, and is busy with locals and visitors both. The Ship Inn sits at 92 High Street. The Buccleuch, in the centre, runs live music, sport and DJs. There is also the Harrow Hotel, the Justinlees carvery, and Maysons, which one drinker called a "great wee pub" and "the only real pub left in Dalkeith."

Market Heritage and the Country Park

The High Street has been a market street for a very long time. The Corn Exchange of 1853, designed by David Cousin, was in its day the largest indoor grain market in Scotland, back when the weekly grain market here served much of the Lothians. A few doors along, the Old Meal Market Inn on St Andrew Street is a survival of the same trade.

North of the High Street the town gives way almost immediately to trees. Dalkeith Country Park is the old estate of the Dukes of Buccleuch, laid out around Dalkeith Palace, with the two branches of the Esk meeting inside it. The ancient oakwoods on the river terraces make good walking, and the park now also holds the Fort Douglas adventure playground, Go Ape, the Restoration Yard and a campsite. If you want a longer line, the Penicuik–Dalkeith Walkway follows a former railway up the Esk valley.

Church, Castle and Court

St Nicholas Buccleuch, the parish church, is Category A listed and dates in its core to the fifteenth century. Its medieval choir was walled off in 1590 and left to become a ruin, and it holds the tombs of James Douglas, 1st Earl of Morton, and Princess Joanna Stewart, daughter of James I, who died in 1493. Her effigy is thought to be possibly the oldest depiction of a hearing-impaired person in the world; a wooden canopy was put up over it in 2005.

The castle that preceded the palace stood here from the twelfth century. Margaret Tudor stayed before her entry into Edinburgh in 1503; Mary, Queen of Scots came in 1565; Cromwell's General Monck ran the government of Scotland from it in the 1650s.

Edinburgh and Eskbank Connections

Edinburgh is about seven miles northwest, twenty minutes or so by road. Trains run from Eskbank on the Borders Railway, which reopened in 2015 after more than forty years without a line.

Beetty Dick, Dalkeith's Town Crier

Dalkeith once had a female town crier, Beetty Dick, who held the post through the middle of the eighteenth century.