Stirling Castle

Stirling Castle

The key to Scotland

On a great crag of volcanic rock, Stirling Castle rises high above a bend in the River Forth, at the place where the Lowlands of Scotland meet the mountains of the Highlands. For centuries this was the most important crossroads in the whole country. Here the main road north met the lowest point at which the wide River Forth could be bridged, which meant that whoever held Stirling could control the movement of armies between the south and the north. It was said that "he who holds Stirling holds Scotland" — and that single fact made the castle one of the most fought-over places in the land.

A prize of the Wars of Independence

During the long Wars of Scottish Independence around the year 1300, Stirling changed hands again and again between Scots and English. In 1297 a Scottish army led by William Wallace and Andrew Moray destroyed an English force at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, fought in the shadow of the castle rock. A few years later, in 1304, King Edward I of England besieged the castle for months and pounded it with an enormous siege engine nicknamed the "Warwolf." And in 1314 the castle was the very prize at the Battle of Bannockburn, fought close by, where Robert the Bruce won Scotland's most famous victory. The fortress was so valuable, and so often captured, that the Scots sometimes deliberately wrecked its own defences so that their enemies could not use it.

Home of the Stewart kings

Most of the grand buildings visitors see today were raised later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Stirling became a favourite home of the Stewart (or Stuart) royal family. King James IV built a magnificent Great Hall around 1503 — the largest banqueting hall ever built in medieval Scotland, its outside once finished in glowing golden limewash. His son, James V, added the Royal Palace in the 1530s and 1540s, a dazzling Renaissance building crowded with carved stone figures and counted among the finest of its kind in Britain. Inside, the ceiling of the king's chamber was once studded with carved oak medallions now known as the Stirling Heads.

Mary, Queen of Scots, and a royal childhood

Stirling was a castle of royal children. Mary, Queen of Scots was crowned here as a baby in 1543, in the castle's Chapel Royal, and spent part of her early childhood safe within its walls. Years later her own son, the future James VI of Scotland and I of England, was raised and educated at Stirling. His baptism in 1566 was celebrated with a great feast and what is often called Scotland's first recorded fireworks display. For generations the castle rang with the lives of kings and queens.

Soldiers and sieges

As the age of royal palaces gave way to the age of gunpowder, Stirling became a working fortress once more. It was besieged for the last time in 1746, during the final Jacobite rising, when the army of Prince Charles Edward Stuart — "Bonnie Prince Charlie" — tried and failed to capture it. For the next two hundred years the castle served as an army barracks and the home of a famous Highland regiment, before it was carefully restored as one of Scotland's greatest monuments.

Visiting today

Today Stirling Castle blazes back to life. Its Great Hall glows once more in golden limewash, and the Royal Palace has been brought back to its sixteenth-century splendour, with bright paint, carved heads and woven tapestries showing the hunt of the unicorn. From the high ramparts you can look out across the battlefield of Bannockburn to the Highland hills beyond. It is a place where almost the entire story of Scotland — Wallace and Bruce, the Renaissance kings, the tragic Mary — seems gathered onto a single rock above the Forth.