Edinburgh for The Curious Wanderers: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

A tapestry studio working in a converted Victorian swimming baths; watch the weavers from the viewing balcony before they knock off.

Streets sealed under the City Chambers in 1753, with plague rooms and a seventeenth-century sawmaker's shop intact.

An old Victorian pump house down a steep close, three hundred whiskies and a cellar-dark room.

Under the castle rock every Saturday: Arbroath smokies, Isle of Mull cheddar and the venison people from the Borders.

Burke's death mask and the pocketbook bound in his skin, in Playfair's temple of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Communal tables in an 1836 cottage, a set menu written from what the growers brought that morning.

The Sunday market by the Water of Leith: oatcakes, haggis, Dumfries cheese and the French crêpe man with the longest queue.

Passages and rooms hand-carved into sandstone beneath a suburban street, purpose unknown; a blacksmith claimed them in 1724.

Licensed since 1360, with a nineteenth-century skittle alley and a roast under low beams; book the alley for an hour before you eat.

The curved terrace of independents: I.J. Mellis the cheesemonger, the brush shop, and the joke shop that predates them all.

A working kiltmaker's with the pleating done by hand on the premises; ask about the twenty-nine thousand stitches in a traditional eight-yard kilt.

A hog roast roll with haggis stuffing and apple sauce, eaten standing in the window.