Wallace Monument

The tower stands 67 metres high on the shoulder of the Abbey Craig, a volcanic crag above Cambuskenneth Abbey overlooking Stirling. The crag is said to have been the point from which William Wallace watched the army of Edward I gathering, just before the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297. The monument was built following a fundraising campaign that accompanied a resurgence of Scottish national identity in the nineteenth century. The Rev Charles Rogers began it in Glasgow in 1851 and was joined by William Burns, who took sole charge from about 1855 after Rogers resigned.

Besides public subscription, the campaign drew contributions from a number of foreign donors, among them the Italian national leader Giuseppe Garibaldi. A monument to a medieval Scottish resistance leader part-funded by the architect of Italian unification is a reminder of how far the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for national heroes travelled.

The architect was John Thomas Rochead, and the design is Victorian Gothic. The Duke of Atholl laid the foundation stone in 1861 in his capacity as Grand Master Mason of Scotland, with a short speech from Sir Archibald Alison. The sandstone tower took eight years to build, was completed in 1869, and cost 18,000 pounds — about 1.8 million in 2024 terms.

Inside are three exhibition rooms and, in the crown, a viewing gallery reached by a 246-step spiral staircase, looking out over the Ochil Hills and the Forth Valley. Artefacts believed to have belonged to Wallace are displayed, including the Wallace Sword, a longsword 1.63 metres long weighing 2.35 kilograms.

The monument also holds the Hall of Heroes, a series of busts of famous Scots amounting to a small national hall of fame. Those commemorated are Robert the Bruce, George Buchanan, John Knox, Allan Ramsay, Robert Burns, Robert Tannahill, Adam Smith, James Watt, Sir Walter Scott, William Murdoch, Sir David Brewster, Thomas Carlyle, Hugh Miller, Thomas Chalmers, David Livingstone and W. E. Gladstone. In 2017 it was announced that Mary Slessor and Maggie Keswick Jencks would be the first heroines added.

The original Victorian statue of Wallace on the corner of the monument is by the Edinburgh sculptor David Watson Stevenson. A second statue had a much shorter career. In 1996 Tom Church carved a Wallace called Freedom, inspired by the film Braveheart and given the face of Mel Gibson, who had played Wallace in it. Church leased the statue to Stirling Council, who installed it in 1997 in the car park of the visitor centre at the foot of the craig. It was deeply unpopular — described as among the most loathed pieces of public art in Scotland — and was vandalised repeatedly until it was placed in a cage to prevent further damage.

Plans to expand the visitor centre with a new restaurant and reception led to its removal in 2008. It was returned to Church, who failed to sell it at auction and reportedly offered it to Donald Trump's Menie estate golf resort. It stayed instead in the garden of the sculptor's home, built into a replica castle and augmented with, among other things, the head of the decapitated governor of York. Local press reported in April 2016 that it might go to Ardrossan's old Barony Church; in September 2021 it was moved to Glebe Park stadium in Brechin.