The area of the basin drained by the burn and its tributaries amounts to 30.5 square kilometres (11.8 sq mi).

[3] 80 per cent of the catchment area of the burn is in the lower urban section, the other portion being south of the Edinburgh City Bypass.

[4] The burn flows through part of its course in a gorge cut by glacial meltwater that exposed a weakness in the rock.

Walls and embankments were constructed at points along the length of the burn, and new culverts and bridges were installed, and alterations to upstream reservoirs in the Pentland Hills were carried out.

[10][11] The burn is mentioned in Muriel Spark's famous novel of Edinburgh, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, when Sandy and Miss Brodie meet after the war at the Braid Hills Hotel: 'They looked out of the wide windows at the little Braid Burn trickling through the fields and at the hills beyond, so austere from everlasting that they had never been capable of losing anything by the war.