Edinburgh
Edinburgh is one of Europe's most beautiful cities, draped across a series of rocky hills overlooking the sea. It's a town intimately entwined with its landscape, with buildings and monuments perched atop crags and overshadowed by cliffs - in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, 'a dream in masonry and living rock'. It's a fantastic destination to mix culture with an epic battle on the rugby pitch.
From the Old Town's picturesque jumble of medieval tenements piled high along the Royal Mile, its turreted skyline strung between the black, bull-nosed Castle Rock and the russet palisade of Salisbury Crags, to the New Town's neat grid of neoclassical respectability, all columns and capitals, porticoes and pediments, the city offers a constantly changing perspective. And it's all small enough to explore easily on foot.
Like a favourite book, Edinburgh is a city you'll want to dip into again and again, savouring each time a different image or experience - the castle silhouetted against a blue spring sky with a yellow haze of daffodils misting the slopes below the esplanade; stumbling out of a late-night club into the pale gold of a summer dawn, with only the yawp of seagulls and the thrum of taxi tyres over cobblestones to break the unexpected silence; heading for a café on a chill morning with the haar (fog) snagging the spires of the Old Town, and the dark mouths of the wynds (alleys) more mysterious than ever.
