If this is too overwhelming a remembrance, there is an opposite to this, looking across the level lands of the Carse. The view leads past the Bridge of Allan, on to Dunblane, near which is the hill of Sheriffmuir. You can see the two armies in the distance of time and of the plain, creeping on each other unwittingly—and the guide, too, is glad to turn to a later and less revered moment—
"Some say that we wan,
Some say that they wan,
And some say that nane wan at a', man;
But o' ae thing I'm sure,
That at Sheriffmuir
A battle there was that I saw, man;
And we ran, and they ran,
And they ran, and we ran,
And they ran and we ran awa', man."
To-day the wind has swept all these murmurs of old wars into the infinite forgotten. The world is as though MacAlpine and Wallace and The Bruce and Prince Charles had not been. Or, is it? It looks that way, at this quiet moment, in this quiet century, and in this country where there is such quiet; a country with such a long tumult, a country with such a strange silence. But the rest of the world would never have been as it is but for the events that lie thick about here, but for the race which was bred in such events.
"And the castle stood up black
With the red sun at its back."
There is something more dour about Stirling than Edinburgh. It is, in the first place, too useful. One never thinks of the castle at Edinburgh as anything but romantic, of the troops as anything but decorative. Stirling is still used, much of it closed, and it has the bare, uninviting look of a historic place maintained by a modern up-keep.
Stirling Castle
Evidently when Burns visited it he found a ruin, and was moved to express his Jacobitism—would a poet be anything but a Jacobite?—
"Here Stuarts once in glory reign'd,
And laws for Scotland's weal ordain'd;
But now unroof'd their palace stands,
Their scepter's sway'd by other hands;
The injured Stuart line is gone,
A race outlandish fills their throne—"
Soon after you enter the gate you come upon the dungeon of Roderick Dhu, and here you get the beginnings of that long song of the Lake, which lies to the west, when Allan Bane tunes his harp for Roderick—