Edinburgh is a capital city of beauty, antiquity and character. Its beginnings were tortuous and dramatic, for under the slow remorseless pressures of a glacier the land on either side of the Castle Rock was scoured out into two deep valleys. The Rock itself, a plug from an old volcano, split the ice like a solid wedge and left in its trail the sheltered sloping ground to the east. On this elevated ridge the settlement began with a few primitive Pictish dwellings made and inhabited by a race which has left to us many monuments and carvings but not one single word of script. The earlier name, Dunedin, means ‘the fortress on the sloping rock’, and as such it was known to the Ancient Britons before and during Roman times. Little exact history remains; in the seventh century the Castle—fortress on the Rock—was rebuilt and enlarged for a Royal refuge. In the eleventh century Queen Margaret built the tiny chapel which stands on the crest of the rock nearly 300 feet above the gardens, and though the Castle has many times changed hands by violence, the Royal Saint's Chapel stands as the oldest building in Edinburgh.