Photographs from Scotland (5)

Time for some more photographs from Scotland, and here are five from Stirling Castle, "the gateway to the Highlands", which we visited on Friday 8 October, on the way from Rioslin to Crianlarich. As is obvious from the photographs, it was a bit damp; we also had very low cloud for the entire journey, which meant that we didn't see all that much of the scenery. (But the round trip from Crianlarich to Oban via Glen Coe the following day was, as I've previously posted, gloriously sunny and clear.)

The castle gets its tag from the fact that, until the early modern period, the land around it was marshy and prone to flooding; it thus controlled the route up from lowlands into the Highlands, and was fought over repeatedly by the English and the Scots during the Scottish Wars of Independence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Following its capture by Robert the Bruce after the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, it was largely levelled to guard against the future possibility of being held against him; most of what one can now see, therefore, dates from the fifteenth century onwards.

These photographs show, in order, a general view of the Castle, on its rock, from the south; a view of the Forework from without (this initially had four half-round towers and now rises to only a third of its original height, having been damaged in the Cromwellian siege of 1651); the casemates and the bowling green the former built as bomb-proof barracks for government troops following the Jacobite uprisings of the early eighteenth century and the latter probably laid out for James IV in the late fifteenth century); the Great Hall (which has recently been restored, externally and internally, to how it may have appeared when completed in 1503); and the Royal Palace, built by James V to house himself and his queen, Mary of Guise, in 1538 (this is currently under restoration, and thus not presently open to the public).

More photographs of Stirling Castle tomorrow....