EDINBURGH, CITY OF

district, Lothian region, eastern Scotland. Created by the reorganization of 1975, it is the former county of the city of Edinburgh, together with portions of the former counties of Midlothian and West Lothian. The district has an area of 102 square miles (265 square km) and covers the city of Edinburgh, its port of Leith lying on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, and its airport at Turnhouse. Pop. (1987 est.) 438,721. History The early period Settlement of the region For the first settlers of Scotland, arriving at the onset of the postglacial period (as early as 7000 BC), estuaries and rivers offered the best access to the interior. The Forth was among the most important of these. Its shoreline and mudflats show evidence of Stone Age explorers, who did not yet need the protection of the region's steep hills. Finds of swords and other metal objects suggest, however, that by about 1500 BC these peoples were using the crags of Arthur's Seat for defense. In the Iron Age, which in Scotland began about 700 BC, hill forts proliferated in the Lothiansthe area in the immediate vicinity of Edinburghand the Borders, to the south. There is no proof that the Castle Rock was occupied at that time, but it is unlikely that so good a defensive site would have been ignored. Holyrood Park, Blackford Hill, and Craiglockhart Hill, however, all show signs of occupation in the late 1st millennium BC. Strategic importance The Romans saw strategic rather than defensive value in the Edinburgh plain between the Pentland Hills and the Forth. During three or four decades in the second half of the 2nd century AD, the Antonine Wall, stretching across Scotland between the River Clyde and the Firth of Forth, was the northernmost defense in Roman Britain, and the site of Cramond, a village on the Forth within the modern city boundary, was the point at which one of Roman Britain's major north-south roads terminated. The road, with major forts at Dalkeith and Inveresk on the southeastern approaches to the present city, cut through what is now the Meadows district of Edinburgh and guarded access to the Carse of Stirling (valley of the River Forth) and the approach to the west and north. If at this time any group occupied the Castle Rock site, it would have been the Votadini, the dominant Celtic tribe of the Lothians, with whom Rome had a relatively stable relationship. The Votadini capital was on Traprain Law, a cone-shaped hill (law) some 20 miles (32 km) east of the modern city; but it appears that about AD 500, after the Roman withdrawal from Britain, the capital was moved to the site of the present castle. A Welsh poem composed about AD 600 describes how a band of the Gododdin (as the Votadini were known in Welsh), from around a place called Din Eidyn, attacked an Anglian force at Catterick in Yorkshire and was annihilated. Din EidynEidyn's Hill Fortis clearly the Castle Rock site. In the following centuries Anglian invaders seem to have vanquished the Gododdin, and by AD 854 Din Eidyn (spelled Dun Eideann in Gaelic) had become Edwinesburh, burh meaning fortress or fortified town. This name later gave rise to the supposition that a Northumbrian princeling called Edwin had founded the town. The date of the poem, however, proves that the name predates Edinburgh's occupation by the Anglians of Northumbria. It is reasonably certain that the Castle Rock site has been continuously occupied for at least 1,400 years, but little is known of the town's earliest centuries.