Edinburgh Castle

I was walking to the car through the Old Town after a reception in Parliament Hall, when I noticed the Castle and its Half Moon Battery looming above me. Edinburgh Castle is almost certainly the historic building I have known longest - my parents used to take me there with my two brothers. Mons Meg was our favourite object to clamber on, tinged only by slight terror that the nearby One O'Clock Gun would go off while were there, causing us to jump out of our skins. Even as a student at Edinburgh in the 1970s, I used to always "take a day off" on my birthday and go to the Castle.

So the Castle has become an old friend. It is the thing I always look up to when I come out of Waverley Station after being somewhere in the train, as I had been today. It is what tells me more than anything else that I am in Edinburgh. It shouldn't be taken for granted.