Auld Reekie

Auld Reekie' is a traditional nickname for the city of Edinburgh, in Scotland. The nickname is from the Scots word reek meaning smoke (not, as is often assumed, smell).

"... people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on the Castle battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town blowing abroad over the subjacent country. A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose, from this distant aspect that she got her nickname of AULD REEKIE. Perhaps it was given her by people who had never crossed her doors: day after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs,

they had seen the pile of building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain; so it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the same field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all expressed in these two words."

from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson [1]