CHAPTER III
THE TROSSACHS ROUND
BEYOND Edinburgh, perhaps the best known town in Scotland is Stirling, which hordes of pilgrims pass in the round trip of a single day through the famous Trossachs District, displaying such a finely mixed assortment of Scottish scenery, lochs, woods, and mountains
that like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land.
Stirling, on the edge of the Highlands, played a central part, even long after the Scottish kings had been drawn down to the rich fields of Lothian and the Merse. From the rock on which the Castle stands, only less boldly than that of Edinburgh, one looks over the Links of Forth, making such sinuous meanderings upon its Carse, and across to the Ochil Hills that border Fife; then from another point of view appear the rugged Bens among which Roderick Dhu had his strongholds. Not fair prospects alone are tourists’ attraction to Stirling. The palace of James V., the houses of great nobles like Argyll and Mar, the execution place of the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Scotland, the memorials of Protestant martyrs, the proud monuments of Bruce and Wallace, the ruins of Cambuskenneth Abbey, with its royal sepulchre, all show this region the heart of mediæval Scottish history. While Edinburgh grew to be recognised as the capital, Stirling Castle was the birthplace and the favourite residence of several among the James Stuarts that came to such an uneasy crown in boyhood; sometimes it was their prison or their school of sanguinary politics, when possession of the royal person counted as ace in the game played by truculently treacherous nobles. It has the distinction of being the last British castle to stand a siege, raised in 1746 by the Duke of Cumberland, when, as his panegyrical historian says, “in the Space of one single Week, his Royal Highness quitted the Court of the King his Father, put himself at the head of his Troops in Scotland, and saw the Enemy flying with Precipitation before him, so that it may be said that his progress was like Lightning, the rebels fled at the flash, fearing the Thunder that was to follow.” Its ramparts look down on Scotland’s dearest battlefields, that where Wallace ensnared the invader at the Old Bridge, and that of Bannockburn, when Bruce turned the flower of English chivalry to dust and to gold, for, as the latest historian says, “it rained ransoms” in Scotland after this profitable victory.
One may speculate what might have been the fate of the United Kingdom had Bannockburn ended otherwise. Would the barons of the north have found a master in Edward III.? Would the Plantagenets, with Scotland to back them, have made good their conquest of France? Would the stern reformers across the Tweed have suffered the Tudors to shape and re-shape the Church as they
