Stirling Castle
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Stirling Castle (daily 9.30am-6.30pm; Oct-March closes 5pm; HS; £6.50, includes entry to Argyll's Lodging) must have presented would-be invaders with a formidable challenge. Its impregnability is most daunting when you approach the town from the west, from where the sheer 250ft drop down the side of the crag is most obvious. The rock was first fortified during the Iron Age, though what you see now dates largely from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Built on many levels, the main buildings are interspersed with delightful gardens and patches of lawn, while endless battlements, cannon ports, hidden staircases and other nooks and crannies make it thoroughly explorable and inspiring.
The visitor centre, in a whitewashed cottage on one side of the esplanade car park, shows an introductory film giving a potted history of the castle, but the best place to get an impression of its gradual expansion is the Outer Close, the first main courtyard beyond the imposing inner gatehouse to the castle. Here you can join a guided tour (free), which leaves every half-hour.
Looming over the courtyard is the magnificent Great Hall, dating from 1501-3 and used as a barracks by the British army until 1964. The building stands out not just in the courtyard but across Stirling for its controversially bright, creamy yellow cladding, added after the discovery during renovations of a stretch of the original sixteenth-century limewash behind a bricked-up doorway. Inside, the hall has been restored to its original state as the finest medieval secular building in Scotland, complete with five gaping fireplaces and an impressive hammer-beam ceiling of rough-hewn wood. To one side of the Great Hall, displays in the restored castle kitchens make a lively attempt to re-create the preparations for the spectacular Renaissance banquet given by Mary, Queen of Scots for the baptism of the future James VI.
The exterior of the Palace, the largest building in the castle, dates from 1540-42 and is richly decorated with grotesque carved figures and Renaissance sculpture, including, in the left-hand corner, the glaring bearded figure of James V in the dress of a commoner. Inside in the royal apartments are the Stirling Heads, 56 elegantly carved oak medallions which once comprised the ceiling of the Presence Chamber, where visitors were presented to royalty. Otherwise the royal apartments are mostly bare, their emptiness emphasizing the fine dimensions and wonderful views.
On the opposite side of the Inner Close, the sloping upper courtyard of the castle, the Chapel Royal was built in 1594 by James VI for the baptism of his son, to replace an earlier chapel that was deemed insufficiently impressive. The interior is lovely, with a seventeenth-century fresco of elaborate scrolls and patterns. Alongside, the King's Old Building, at the highest point in the castle, now houses the museum of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders regiment, with its collection of well-polished silver and memorabilia, including a seemingly endless display of Victoria Crosses. Go through a narrow passageway between the King's Old Building and the Chapel Royal to get to the Douglas Gardens, reputedly the place where the eighth Earl of Douglas, suspected of treachery, was thrown to his death by James II in 1452. It's a lovely, quiet corner of the castle, with mature trees and battlements over which there are splendid views of the rising Highlands beyond, as well as a bird's-eye view down to the King's Knot, a series of grassed octagonal mounds which in the seventeenth century were planted with box trees and ornamental hedges.
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