Stirling Castle

In July 1304 the garrison of Stirling Castle surrendered and Edward I sent them back inside. He had brought at least seventeen siege engines north, and his newest — a great trebuchet called Warwolf — had not yet been used. The Scots under William Oliphant gave up on 20 July; part of the garrison were ordered back into the castle so that Edward could see what his machine would do. Warwolf destroyed the gatehouse.

That episode is a fair measure of what Stirling was worth. The castle sits on an intrusive crag, part of the Stirling Sill, a quartz-dolerite formation some 350 million years old that glaciation shaped into a crag and tail. Cliffs on three sides make it strong, but the real value lay below: until the 1890s this was the farthest downstream crossing of the River Forth. Whoever held Stirling held the passage between the north and south of Scotland, and there have been at least eight sieges here.

Its early history is thinner than the legends attached to it. The first record dates from around 1110, when Alexander I dedicated a chapel; the king died here in 1124, which suggests an established royal centre by then. Hector Boece claimed the Romans fortified Stirling under Agricola, and that Kenneth MacAlpin besieged a castle here in the ninth century, but Boece is considered an unreliable historian. William Worcester associated the rock with the court of King Arthur. There is no archaeological evidence for occupation of Castle Hill before the late medieval period at all.

The Wars of Scottish Independence turned the castle over repeatedly. Edward I invaded in 1296 and found Stirling abandoned and empty. The English were dislodged the next year after Andrew Moray and William Wallace won at Stirling Bridge, their commanders retreating into the castle and being starved out. It changed hands again after Falkirk, was besieged in 1299 by forces including Robert Bruce, and by 1303 was the last castle in Scottish hands — which is what brought Edward and Warwolf north.

The decisive reversal came within sight of the walls. On 23 June 1314 King Robert’s forces met the English at Bannockburn. Edward II tried to take refuge in the castle afterwards and was refused, and King Robert then ordered Stirling slighted, its defences destroyed so the English could not use them again.

Almost everything standing today was built afterwards, between 1490 and 1600, when James IV, James V and James VI developed Stirling as a principal royal residence. The Great Hall, built by James IV and being plastered by 1503, has been described as the grandest secular building erected in Scotland in the late Middle Ages — 42 metres by 14.25, with five fireplaces and large windows lighting the dais where the king sat. His Forework gatehouse of around 1506 was probably intended more for display than defence, and its triple entrance, a carriage passage flanked by two for pedestrians, was unusual enough that Classical triumphal arches have been suggested as the source.

The Royal Palace is the centrepiece. Begun in the 1530s by James V and largely finished by the late 1540s, it is the first Renaissance palace in the British Isles — French-inspired in its architecture, German in its decoration, with sources for its statues traced to the engraver Hans Burgkmair. Among the full-size figures around the principal floor are James V himself, the Devil and St Michael. The Master of Works until his execution in 1540 was Sir James Hamilton of Finnart, who financed part of the building himself in return for land and favours from the king.

Odder things happened here too. If a satirical account in two poems by William Dunbar rests on fact, the castle walls saw an attempt at human-powered flight around 1509 by the Italian alchemist John Damian, abbot of Tongland. The Captain of the Castle kept another alchemist maintaining a furnace for quinta essencia, the mythical fifth element.

The castle is a Scheduled Ancient Monument, managed by Historic Environment Scotland and open year-round; 609,698 people visited in 2019. The esplanade has served as an open-air concert venue for acts including R.E.M., Bob Dylan and Rod Stewart, and hosts the city’s Hogmanay celebrations. The Regimental Museum of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders occupies the King’s Old Building.