National Museum of Scotland

The Story of National Museum of Scotland

Rising on Chambers Street at the boundary between the medieval Old Town and the university quarter, the National Museum of Scotland is one of the world's great encyclopedic museums. Formed through the union of the Victorian Museum of Science and Art and the contemporary Museum of Scotland, the institution houses millions of artifacts spanning natural history, world cultures, science, design, and Scottish history.

The Victorian building, opened in 1866 and designed by Captain Francis Fowke, centers on the soaring Grand Gallery. Inspired by London's Crystal Palace, its slender cast-iron columns, soaring round-headed skylights, and light-filled atrium create one of the most magnificent public interior spaces in Europe. Here, visitors encounter world icons ranging from the stuffed remains of Dolly the Sheep (the first cloned mammal) to the Millennium Clock Tower, an intricate kinetic sculpture that chimes hourly.

In the adjoining modern sandstone wing designed by Benson & Forsyth, visitors journey through Scottish antiquity, from the mysterious Pictish symbol stones and the 12th-century Lewis Chessmen to the actual maiden guillotine that beheaded Regent Morton in 1581. The museum also preserves the Monymusk Reliquary, an 8th-century casket said to have been carried into the Battle of Bannockburn by Robert the Bruce's army.

Yet the museum's most extraordinary lesser-known feature awaits on the seventh floor. A discreet lift ride from the Scottish galleries opens directly onto a landscaped open-air rooftop terrace. Planted with native Scottish heathers, sea-pinks, and bog flora, the terrace offers a dramatic, unobstructed 360-degree panorama of Edinburgh Castle and the Old Town rooftops that most casual visitors miss entirely.