A hugely popular walking tour which takes Harry Potter fans on a magical adventure through the streets of Edinburgh has moved online.
The Potter Trail, which normally visits iconic locations in the capital such as the real life Diagon Alley and the school which inspired Hogwarts in person, is now giving wizarding fans from around the world the chance to enjoy the next best thing - a Zoom tour from the comfort of their homes.
According to one of the guides Richard Duffy, the virtual tours use a combination of Google Earth and high resolution images to visit all the locations they would normally cover in real life.
He said: "Your guide will be live over Zoom covering all the locations in Edinburgh that inspired JK Rowling as well as her old writing haunts.
"We aim to keep the magic alive with spell casting, a house point competition and a sorting ceremony."
Richard explained the literary trail was started back in 2012 by a group of students from the Edinburgh University Comedy Society, he said: "All of our guides are still trained comic performers to this day which gives the tour a nice theatricality and humour. And yes, we are all Harry Potter fanatics!"
He added that the transfer to the virtual world has been fairly seemless and has allowed them to open the tour up to even more Potterverse fans around the world, he said: "We've been very pleasantly surprised by how popular our virtual tours have been.
"We've run over 100 since the end of April and are actually about as busy as we would have been with real life tours this time last year.
"Going virtual has opened up the whole world as our market. Although we can't wait to get our real life tours started again, we're planning to continue doing virtual ones even once they do."
To book the tour, Richard said that you simply have to fill out the form on their website at pottertrail.com.
Costing £40, you will get a Zoom link for the tour that you can share with up to 20 computers.
He added: "We would recommend a minimum age of 7 but generally if they are old enough to read the books they are old enough to take the tour!"
