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Unusual & Unique Things to Do in Edinburgh

Anyone can climb the Castle. If you want a weekend that gives you better stories than the group next door, Edinburgh has a deep bench of the odd, the hidden and the slightly macabre. Here are the unusual ones worth a group's time.

Wonderfully weird attractions

  • Camera Obscura & World of Illusions on Castlehill is five floors of mirror mazes, a vortex tunnel and a Victorian rooftop camera. It is chaotic, hands-on and impossible to do quietly, which is the point.
  • The Real Mary King's Close takes you through actual streets sealed beneath the Royal Mile. A great spooky icebreaker early in the trip.
  • Surgeons' Hall Museums is a genuinely macabre medical museum, home to a pocketbook bound in the skin of the murderer William Burke. Not for the faint-hearted, and a guaranteed talking point.

Competitive socialising

  • Boom Battle Bar near the Omni Centre stacks axe throwing, augmented-reality darts and crazy golf under one roof, with stag and hen packages built in. Axe throwing is 18-plus. If you would rather we booked the axes, we run our own axe throwing too.
  • Escape rooms are a great way to split a big group into teams and find out who actually panics. Several Edinburgh operators take large groups across multiple rooms.

Gin and whisky with a twist

All 18-plus, all more fun than they sound.

  • Pickering's Gin at Summerhall runs a quirky "Jolly Tour" of a gin distillery hand-built in a former vet school, seating up to 85. Relaxed, boozy and cheap.
  • Johnnie Walker Princes Street is an eight-floor immersive whisky experience topped with two rooftop bars.
  • For the classic version, the Scotch Whisky Experience does a barrel-ride tour and tasting.

The scares

  • The Edinburgh Dungeon is a live-actor horror-comedy walkthrough with a drop ride, and it does private group tours. See our ghost tours guide for the scarier, real-history alternatives.

Turn it into a weekend

Pick one of these as your Saturday centrepiece and we will build the rest around it. Browse the full activities list or let us do the lot: get a quote or talk to a planner.