“And I could just see a plume of smoke coming up from the other side of the ridge. I thought, ‘that’s quite a lot of smoke’. I started walking down from the top, and I looked back over in the plume of smoke was quite big.
“And you could see licks of flames starting to come up. And I thought, ‘oh, this is actually quite a serious fire that’s starting’. And the wind was blowing towards us quite fiercely from there, yeah. And so I started walking quite quickly.”
Brice, who is producing a show at the Edinburgh Fringe, said he warned people still walking up to the top of Arthur’s Seat about the blaze before stopping to watch the fire from a safe distance.
“In the next 45 minutes or so, it literally worked its way all the way down the slope and spread out, and then we were asked to move on,” he said.
“And suddenly there was smoke everywhere. It was literally spreading all the way across the whole side of the mountain.”
Brice estimated that the flames were as much as 4.5m high when a bush caught fire and he could hear the “crackling”.
However, he said there was no panic, with “nonchalant” people continuing to head up Arthur’s Seat. He also said the fire brigade had moved a pump into the nearby loch to prepare to fight the blaze.
Another witness told Edinburgh Live: “People are running down the face of the hill to get away from it, and smoke is spreading really fast.”
Scotland experienced the biggest wildfires in its history this summer.
Two blazes broke out within a few miles of each other and tore through Dava Moor, in Moray, and near Carrbridge, in the Highlands, in June.
Arthur’s Seat is an ancient volcano that lies 251m above sea level, offering views of the city.
The park is home to four hill forts, which have stood for two millennia, as well as a 15th-century mediaeval chapel and Duddingston Loch, which attracts a wide variety of birds.
