Climate change protestors have tried and failed to block Edinburgh's Princes Street after police detained at least six of them.

Extinction Rebellion campaigners have closed off the capital's North Bridge for most of Tuesday afternoon. 

A small breakaway group spilled on to the both Princes Street and Leith Street but were removed by police.

There was no aggression or violence. Protestors who tried to cut off the city's main thoroughfare included a women who left her wheelchair to sit close to a traffic island. She later returned to the main protest.

A police officer shouted "keep it proportionate" as officers lifted campaigners off the road and carried them away to waiting vehicles. 

Good-humoured protestors had been signing and dancing for most of the afternoon. One popular chorus rang "Keep the coal in the  hole, keep the oil in the soil". Another went: "Climate change is not a lie. Do not let our planet die."

Campaigner Amy Milner, 21, clutching a green flag with Extinction Rebellion's trademark symbol of egg timer in a circle, said: "We are here to let people know that time is running out to act on climate change before irreversible damage is done."

Passers-by were mostly curious but one man shouted abuse at crowds, numbering low hundreds. "Some of us are trying to get home," he said. "And the climate has been warming for centuries."

Ms Milner, a student of sustainable development, disagreed. There is just a short decade, she argued, for human-made warming to be kept to just 1.5 degrees.