Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Listen for a moment. The traffic of central Edinburgh has faded behind you. Here, on Belford Road, the sounds are softer: wet grass, a blackbird in the trees, the scrape of a child's shoes on a gravel path. In front of you, the lawn does not lie flat. It rises and curves in long green waves, with still water caught between them. You have arrived at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the first work of art here is the ground under your feet.

Those green waves have a name. They are called Landform, and they were designed by the American architect and landscape artist Charles Jencks. He shaped the earth into a stepped, spiralling mound with crescent-shaped ponds at its base. It was completed in the early 2000s. On a sunny day, the terraces throw sharp lines of shadow, and the ponds hold a copy of the sky. On a grey day, the whole thing looks like a sleeping animal under a green blanket. You are welcome to walk on it, so climb the spiral path to the top.

From up there, look at the two large buildings that face each other across Belford Road. They look nothing like a modern art gallery. Both are grand, pale stone buildings in the neoclassical style, which means they borrow columns, porticoes and strict symmetry from ancient Greece and Rome. That is the first surprise of this place. Some of the most challenging art of the twentieth century hangs inside buildings that were designed in the nineteenth century to look calm, ordered and permanent.

The gallery calls its two buildings Modern One and Modern Two. Modern One is the building behind the Landform. It was not built for art. It was built as a school, known as John Watson's Institution, which educated children from families in difficult circumstances. Across the road, Modern Two began life as the Dean Orphan Hospital, designed by the architect Thomas Hamilton. Both buildings were created to care for children. Today they care for paintings, sculptures and the people who come to see them.

The collection itself is younger than the stone around it. The national collection of modern art was founded in 1960, and at first it lived in a modest house in the Royal Botanic Garden, a short distance away. It outgrew that home. In 1984, the gallery moved into the old school building here on Belford Road. Then, in 1999, the former orphan hospital opened as a second gallery. So the collection you visit today was gathered over decades and slowly found more space.

As you walk between the buildings, keep your eyes open, because sculpture is everywhere. The grounds hold works by major British and international artists. You may see bronze figures standing in the grass and abstract forms set against the trees. Some pieces sit in obvious places near the paths. Others are tucked into corners of the lawn, where you meet them almost by accident. This is part of the design. The gallery wants you to find art outdoors, in rain and wind, not only behind glass.

Look up at the classical stone fronts as well. On one of them, you may notice something that does not belong to the nineteenth century at all: a line of bright neon letters by the Scottish artist Martin Creed. They spell out a simple sentence — Everything is going to be alright. On a dark winter afternoon, the glowing words against old sandstone feel like a quiet message to everyone passing by. It is a small, warm joke between the old building and the new art.

Inside Modern One, the rooms carry the story of art from the early twentieth century onward. The collection includes work by Scottish painters as well as artists known around the world. You can follow how painters moved away from showing the world exactly as it looks. Colour becomes louder. Shapes break apart. Faces turn into planes and angles. The building's tall windows and high ceilings give the paintings space, and daylight changes the mood of the rooms as clouds move over the city.

Now cross to Modern Two, because this building holds the second surprise. It has one of the most important collections of Surrealist art in Britain. Surrealism was an art movement of the early twentieth century that tried to paint dreams and the hidden parts of the mind. Melting logic, strange objects and impossible scenes are its language. Much of this collection came to the gallery as gifts from private collectors, so these rooms carry the personal taste of people who loved these artists deeply.

Modern Two also honours an artist born in Scotland: Eduardo Paolozzi, a sculptor from Leith, the port district of Edinburgh. Inside, look for a reconstruction of his studio. It is crowded with tools, plaster casts, toys, models and fragments, exactly the kind of creative mess an artist really works in. Nearby, a huge sculpture of a figure called Vulcan fills the space from floor to ceiling. Vulcan was the Roman god of fire and the forge. Stand at its feet and look straight up to feel its full height.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Behind and below these buildings runs the Water of Leith, the small river that flows through Edinburgh to the sea. A walking path follows it. From the gallery grounds you can find your way down to the riverside and walk to Dean Village, a cluster of old mill buildings in a deep green valley. It is one of the gentlest walks in the city, and it turns a gallery visit into a half-day outdoors.

The gallery has cafés in both buildings, and in good weather people carry their coffee outside to the terraces and lawns. On weekends, you will see families letting children run over the Landform, students sketching sculptures, and older visitors who clearly come back often and walk straight to a favourite room. That mix of people is part of the character here. The place feels less like a temple to art and more like a park where art happens to live.

Before you leave, stand still for one more moment. Look at the curved green terraces, the pale columns, the trees moving along the edge of the grounds. Two buildings that once sheltered children now shelter strange and beautiful ideas. As you walk back toward the city, notice how the noise of traffic slowly returns... and perhaps glance back once more at those glowing words on the old stone. Everything is going to be alright.