The National Museums of Scotland is situated on Chambers Street near the George IV Bridge and contains the principal Scottish and worldwide collections of artefacts, antiques, science and technology.

The National Museums were created in 2006 when the Royal Museum and the Museum of Scotland merged and were linked internally by opening former storage areas and the creation of the Grand Gallery. The display areas spread from the basement to the roof and the vaulted Entrance Hall is huge and truly amazing, covering an area of 1400 square metres.

The central space of the Grand Gallery contains large objects that don’t fit into the smaller exhibitions, so it is a pot-pourri of wonderful items. The “Window on the World” is an impressive 20 metres high and displays over 800 diverse objects. Each side of the Grand Gallery displays “Discoveries” made by Scottish inventors.

You will find something to interest everyone here; from one of Elton John’s more extravagant outfits to ancient Egyptian mummies with CT scans next to them, showing everything that is hiding under their wrappings!

The antiques collection is amazing and gives you an insight to history and past cultures. The kids will love the Natural History section with its display of dinosaur bones and extinct animals.

With 16 new galleries opened in 2011 and a further 8000 original objects on display, a visit to the National Museums is an excellent way to spend the day.

Lots of people dream of being a successful author with the riches and acclaim that go with the job. A visit to the Writer’s Museum on the Mound probably won’t help you on your way, but it will give you a great insight to some of Scotland’s most distinguished writers, so you shouldn’t miss visiting it.

You will find the museum in the Lady Stair’s House in the Close of the same name. The house was built in 1622 and was bought by the Dowager Countess of Stair in the late 18th century. Her descendants donated the house to the city of Edinburgh in 1907 on the premise that they use it for a museum of some sort.

They turned it into a museum dedicated to Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, with mementoes by other Scottish writers. The house is beautifully decorated in clear colours and you really get the feeling of stepping back in time.

This lovely house is full of the three great writers’ personnel objects, from a plaster cast of Robert Burns’ skull, Sir Walter Scott’s wooden rocking horse to a book won by Robert Louis Stevenson when he was at school.

You will see Scott’s personal dining room, taken from his house and lovingly recreated here, along with his chessboard and the original printing press where his Waverley novels were printed. There is also a scale model of the Scott Monument.

On Robert Burns’ writing desk you will find manuscripts and rough copies of his works, with mistakes neatly crossed out and jottings in the margins of the pages. You can admire Stevenson’s favourite fishing rod and photos of his life in Samoa.

There are many temporary exhibitions displaying the works of contemporary Scottish writers and a great gift shop where you can buy copies of the writers’ books and poems.

What is the difference between “whisky” and “whiskey”? If you don’t know, visit The Scotch Whisky Experience and find the answer to that question and discover a whole lot of other interesting facts about Scotland’s favourite tipple.

This interactive museum is great fun, even for children, who have their own guide – “Peat the Cat”, who will take them on an exciting tour full of fun facts and games. For the adults, the journey through the museum begins with a barrel ride that will take you through a mechanical replica of one of the first whisky distilleries. In here, the “Whisky Ghost” will tell you all about the distilling procedure.

Leaving the distillery, you’ll enter the MacIntyre Whisky Gallery where you will learn some, but not all, the secrets about how the different whisky flavours are reached. Certain procedures are kept secret to keep the concurrence guessing! From this gallery you’ll continue into Sense of Scotland and experience the heady aromas of different types of whisky.

Finally you’ll visit the tasting room where you will certainly find a whisky to suit your taste buds – just don’t ask for ice or soda – these additives are almost hanging offences! The museum has a wonderful shop with over 300 different malts on offer and gift boxes of miniatures.

The shop is open to museum visitors and the general public alike, but if you have taken the tour, you will have a generous reduction on your purchases.

The Museum on the Mound is an enriching and eye-opening experience that you really shouldn’t miss.

This fascinating museum opened in 2006 and is housed in the former Bank of Scotland headquarters which is decorated with portraits of notable Scottish bankers, pictures and maps showing Edinburgh over the centuries. But the museum isn’t about the history of the city; it’s about money. It is one of the three banking museums in the United Kingdom.

It covers over 4000 years of the history of money – from the time when goods were paid for in feathers, sand, salt or tea to the modern credit cards. You’ll learn about how the banking system evolved from people leaving their savings hidden in churches and monasteries to futuristic electronic banking.

You will see coins galore and bank notes from over the ages, including the first Scottish bank note, which in 1716 was the first paper currency to be printed in the world. One gallery is dedicated to the history of the Bank of Scotland.

There are interesting interactive displays and you can even try your hand at cracking a safe! In the Forgery Section you will learn the different methods used by notorious forgers and behind a glass display case is a million pounds in bank notes. Don’t get any ideas from your safe-cracking experiment – the notes are genuine, but cancelled!

House museums are always interesting to visit, not only because you get a fascinating insight into the lives of the building’s former owners, but also because you can see what fashions were like in the owner’s day. John Knox House is no exception.

The house was built in around 1490 and is the oldest house on the Royal Mile. It has wonderful hand-painted ceilings, oak beams and wooden galleries. Today it is owned and managed by the Church of Scotland, but once it belonged to James Mossman, who was a royal goldsmith. He fashioned the crown for Mary, Queen of Scots and later, the crown for her son, King James VI of Scotland.

Whether John Knox, the 16th century Protestant Reformer, actually ever lived there is debatable, but the house, which had become badly dilapidated, was saved from demolition in the 18th century by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, who put about the rumour that this had been Knox’s home before he died.

The house museum is a great place to visit for anyone who is interested in religious history as there are many manuscripts and artefacts from the Reformation, including papers placed in a time capsule by Knox.

The museum is part of the Scottish Story-Telling Centre and the history of Knox, Mossman and life Edinburgh before and after the Reformation are related by guides in dress costume. There is a special room for children, full of puzzles and where they can dress up as John Knox.

Don’t miss a visit to the Museum of Edinburgh, which you will find in the 16th century Huntley House on the Royal Mile.

This wonderful museum is all about the origins, the history and the legends of the city. The house once belonged to the Guild of Hammermen and there are many fine silverware objects on display.

There is also a collection of beautiful glassware, engraved in nearby Canongate, fine Scottish pottery, magnificent grandfather clocks and a Sedan chair. There is an interactive area with workshops, quizzes and you can dress up in costumes that represent fashion in different centuries. Each item in the museum is clearly named and has a short history about its origins.

You can admire relics from a 1st century Roman settlement found during excavations in Cramond, a small village to the north-west of the city where the River Almond empties into the Firth of Forth.

You will also find the original copy of the National Covenant, James Craig’s designs for the New Town and Greyfriars Bobby’s dog dish and collar. There is a “rogues’ gallery” of sorts, where you will meet Deacon Brodie, who was a cabinet maker by day and a house-breaker by night, or Burke and Hare, the infamous body-snatchers who sold their gruesome merchandise to Dr Robert Knox of the University of Medicine.