Peer up the High Street in Edinburgh on any given Sunday in January or February, say, and you probably won’t see much in the way of people. Empty pizza boxes, yes. Rain, probably. But people? Less so. You certainly won’t see jugglers on stilts, street performers dressed like astronauts who appear to defy the laws of gravity, or buskers whose skills with banjo/guitar/trumpet/saw are jaw-dropping enough for their caps to be brimming with change (though many take cards these days too).

For those sorts of sights you have to wait until the summer wheels around, until the tourists arrive in their tens of thousands and the city becomes thronged with performers arriving for the annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It was that sight and that city which Herald photographer Gordon Terris dipped into on the final Sunday of the 2015 Edinburgh festival, here capturing Texan rope maestro Duke Loopin in all his crowd-pleasing, Stetson-wearing, lasso-tastic glory.

Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the capital in August will know that the High Street is a place to be embraced or avoided, depending on your tolerance for crowds and buskers. It’s a cliché to say you’ll be handed a flyer ever couple of yards, but like all clichés there’s an element of truth there.

Of course it isn’t the entire length of the High Street which is so choked with gawpers and performers that you can barely squeeze a suitcase on wheels through, far less a car or taxi. The High Street is a stretch of thoroughfare running from the uppermost end of the Canongate – which is basically the junction with Jeffrey Street and St Mary Street – and continuing uphill from the High Kirk of Edinburgh (St Giles Cathedral if you must) to just past the top of Bank Street where it becomes the Lawnmarket. However for the purposes of the festival, the High Street is the section (now closed off entirely) bordered by the top of Cockburn Street and George IV Bridge.

Is all that perfectly clear?

It’s here, at 180 High Street, that you’ll find the headquarters of the Fringe Society, which is one reason for the street being the epicentre of the Fringe in many respects. Another is that, well, there are few more atmospheric, scenic or history-laden places in the capital. Much filmed, endlessly Instagrammed and hymned in fiction by everyone from Jenni Fagan and William Boyd to Robert Louis Stevenson and James Hogg, it is central to everything.

Texan rope tricksters come and go, the High Street of Edinburgh is eternal.