Ross McDowell / Tartan Compass
On Edinburgh's southern edge, runners, walkers, cyclists and horse riders share the Pentlands with farms, livestock, reservoirs and the people who manage the land.
I've walked more than 40 routes through the Pentlands and there are still places I want to discover. I don't really think of them as just Edinburgh's local hills. The weather changes them, the seasons change them and snow can make them feel like a different landscape altogether. I know these hills well and I still don't get bored with them.
The Pentlands are close enough to Edinburgh to become part of everyday outdoor life. People arrive before work, after work and at weekends to walk, run and cycle, while the same tracks may also be carrying horse riders or passing through fields with livestock. The Regional Park warns cyclists explicitly that its routes are shared with runners, walkers, horses, dogs and farm animals. That recreational landscape remains a working one. Sheep farming dominates much of the hills, more than 30 landowners are involved across the Regional Park, and the reservoirs form another visible layer of human use. Access therefore depends on people recognising that open countryside can be both somewhere to enjoy and somebody else's workplace. That makes the Pentlands a particularly useful Scottish story for overseas visitors. Responsible access is not about staying behind a fence. It is about understanding what else is happening on the land.
Look at the shared infrastructure: gates, tracks, signs, field boundaries and paths worn by different kinds of users. Then look at the reservoirs. They can appear completely natural from a distance, but dam walls and engineered shorelines reveal their purpose. The Pentlands work because recreation, water, farming and land management occupy the same hills rather than separate zones.
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