My friend Isabel and I had lost ourselves in talk as we strolled the northern boundary of Leith Links, pausing by the cricket pavilion to duck a sudden hailstorm. “Nearly June!” we muttered, watching the white pellets bounce off the turf. When it cleared, we pushed onto the Restalrig Railway Path and branched off towards Seafield. We had hoped to take the beach all the way to ‘Porty’, but a high tide had other ideas. The road it was: busy, featureless, and with the Seafield Stink thick in our nostrils. As cars swept past at an unsettling pace, I made my position plain. “This is why I take the paths.”

Werner Herzog once said that ‘the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot’. I think about that often when looking for quiet routes through Edinburgh: a search for calm in a congested city, a way to step off the obvious routes and find corridors that feel private, sheltered, and purposeful. Something about them feels both deliberate and accidental, shaped by history but available to anyone willing to look.

Of Edinburgh’s core paths, the old railway lines are the finest: the easiest way to traverse the city and the richest in character. These narrow industrial corridors, once used to move freight and passengers, now sit like seams from another era threaded through the modern city. Many were formally converted into public footpaths by the Council in the 1980s, but they survive as traces of the city’s industrial past. Built to take something somewhere, they now take people somewhere. Walking them is a way of reading history while moving through it. You can see where routes diverge, meet, and reconnect, and begin to understand the logic that once shaped this place. Old infrastructure repurposed for everyday life, including former stations at Corstorphine and Trinity, is one of the things that keeps drawing me back.

Railway paths often feel warm and sheltered. Lined by trees or hedgerows and quieter than exposed open ground, they have a built-in directionality that makes them easy to follow. In winter they hold the cold a little longer; in summer the shade is welcome and the light falls differently. That steadiness matters. Some years ago, when things were not going well, the railway paths came into their own. They felt welcoming and safe: places that would take me somewhere and bring me back. That is exactly what you need when you are trying to think something through.

Walking these routes is about more than movement. It is the sensory details that mark time and offer comfort: blackberries ripening along a bank, wild garlic in spring, the way autumn leaves settle and low light catches a sheltered burn. Those details make each walk a lived experience rather than simple exercise, and their accumulation is why I keep returning.

I have also been writing about these paths: less detailed history, more emotional response. The feelings and sensations of walking, the way a route can shift your mood before you consciously notice. These excursions into ‘psychogeography’ have given me permission to let my thinking roam, to imagine routes opening ahead, and to capture the discoveries I still make after years on the same ground.

The places I am most drawn to are dense networks: the North Edinburgh Path Network, riverside shortcuts, burns, and hidden glens. The Burdiehouse Burn Walkway, which takes you through picturesque Ellen’s Glen, is a particularly underappreciated route. The gentle Figgate Burn from Duddingston towards Portobello is another. These are well-used paths that rarely make guidebooks but are rich in atmosphere and easy to reach. The routes often connect in unexpected ways, creating journeys that feel like private discoveries even when walked by locals every day. Finding something that has always been there but largely overlooked brings a particular kind of satisfaction.

These paths are one of Edinburgh’s great assets. They preserve fragments of the city’s industrial past while offering quiet, useful routes for everyday life; a generous gift from the past to the present. They make the city layered and surprising: even when popular spots are crowded, something peaceful is usually only a short walk away. A different Edinburgh sits just off the main routes. To walk these paths is not to turn your back on the city, but to know its other faces. And I will keep walking them because, after a lifetime on this ground, Herzog’s promise holds…

Keep your eyes open, and the world keeps showing itself.