“Someone has taped a handwritten sign to the recycling bin outside that reads 'GLASS ONLY — THIS MEANS YOU, FLAT 3.'”

The Cowgate smells like hops and rain. You come down from the Royal Mile — down being the operative word, because Edinburgh is a city that works in layers, medieval streets stacked on top of each other like geological strata — and the air changes. It gets heavier, damper, a little beery. Friday night, the pubs along this stretch are already loud by seven. A bouncer outside Three Sisters nods at no one in particular. Two students in matching scarves are arguing about whether the chippy on Chambers Street is better than the one on Forrest Road. You pass a tattoo parlour, a kebab shop with a queue, and a stone archway that frames a view of the Salisbury Crags so sudden and perfect it feels staged. The Holiday Inn Express is right here, on this street, between all of it. You don't arrive at it so much as you arrive at the Cowgate and the hotel happens to be where you stop walking.

Which is, honestly, the best thing about it. This is not a hotel that's trying to be a destination. It's a Holiday Inn Express. You know what you're getting. The lobby is clean and bright and smells faintly of that universal hotel-lobby scent — part carpet cleaner, part nothing. Check-in takes four minutes. The lift works. The corridors are quiet. There's a vending machine on the second floor that sells Irn-Bru, which feels like a concession to place that someone in corporate probably agonised over.

The room, the street, the morning

The room is small and does everything a room needs to do. The bed is firm — genuinely firm, not the marshmallow-with-a-board-underneath firm that budget hotels sometimes attempt. There's a desk by the window that fits a laptop and a takeaway container side by side, which is the only desk configuration that matters. The shower has decent pressure and gets hot fast. The towels are white and thin in that specific Holiday Inn Express way, where they're perfectly clean but you wouldn't describe them as luxurious to anyone, ever. The blackout curtains work, which in Edinburgh in June — when the sun doesn't fully set until nearly eleven — is not a small thing.

What you hear depends on the night. Friday and Saturday, the Cowgate is one of Edinburgh's primary going-out streets, and sound travels upward through old stone. It's not unbearable — more like a low, sociable hum punctuated by the occasional taxi horn or group singalong. Earplugs wouldn't hurt if you're a light sleeper. By Sunday it's silent enough to hear pigeons on the windowsill at six in the morning, cooing with the self-importance of pigeons everywhere.

Breakfast is the included Express Start spread: cereal, toast, scrambled eggs from a warming tray, beans, sausages that taste exactly like what they are. Coffee comes from a machine. It's fine. It's fuel. But here's the thing — you're two minutes on foot from Brew Lab on South College Street, which does a flat white that will rearrange your morning, and four minutes from The Edinburgh Larder on Blackfriars Street, where the potato scones are made in-house and the eggs are from actual nearby chickens. The hotel doesn't need to do breakfast brilliantly because the Cowgate's neighbours do it for them.

“Edinburgh is a city that works in layers, and the Cowgate is the layer where the city stops performing and starts living.”

Location is the whole argument here. The Royal Mile is a steep five-minute walk uphill — you'll feel it in your calves by day three, and you'll be weirdly proud of it. The National Museum of Scotland is an eight-minute walk. Grassmarket, with its pubs and weekend market stalls, is around the corner. Arthur's Seat is close enough that you can do the hike before breakfast if you're that kind of person. (I am not that kind of person, but I watched several of them leave the hotel at 6 AM in hiking boots and return looking annoyingly refreshed.) Bus stops on South Bridge connect you to Leith, Stockbridge, and the Botanics without fuss. The number 35 to Ocean Terminal runs every twelve minutes.

The Wi-Fi is free and functional, though it hiccupped once during a video call in a way that made me look like I was transmitting from 1997. The staff are friendly in a low-key Edinburgh way — helpful when asked, otherwise content to let you get on with things. Someone at the front desk recommended a whisky bar on Victoria Street called Bow Bar, and that recommendation alone was worth the interaction. No cocktail menu, no fuss, just a man behind a wooden bar who knows more about single malts than most people know about anything.

Walking out

Sunday morning, the Cowgate is a different street. The pubs are shuttered. A man in a high-vis vest is hosing down the pavement outside a nightclub. Two seagulls are dismantling a chip wrapper with forensic precision. You can hear your own footsteps on the cobblestones, and above you, through the gap between buildings, the castle sits on its rock like it's been watching the whole time. The light is pale and grey and specifically Scottish.

If you're leaving by train, Waverley Station is a ten-minute walk downhill. If you're heading to the airport, the Airlink 100 picks up on Waverley Bridge and costs $6 one way. Buy the ticket on the app — the queue at the stop during Festival season is its own endurance event.