One may use Stirling Castle for lovelier ends than history or battle, for temporal ends of beauty—which is not temporal. Else would the prospect from these ramparts not linger immortally in the memory and flash upon the inward eye as one of the most wonderful views in all the world.
From Queen Mary's Lookout there is the King's Park, with the King's Knot, the mysterious octagonal mound; it may have looked lovelier when Mary looked down on its flower gardens and its orchards, but this green world is sightly.
From the battlements above the Douglass garden there is a magnificent survey; the rich Carse of broad alluvial land with the Links of the Firth winding in and out among the fields, shining, and steely, reluctant to widen out into the sea. The Ochils from the far background, and nearer is the Abbey Craig, thickly wooded and crowned by the Wallace monument, which while it adds nothing to the beauty of the scene, would have made such a commanding watch tower for Wallace. Just below is the old Bridge which—not this bridge, but it looks old enough with its venerable five hundred years—divided the English forces. Near by, on one of the Links, stands the tower of Cambuskenneth Abbey, a pleasant walk through fields and a ferry ride across the Forth, to this memoried place, which once was a great abbey among abbeys; I doubt not David founded it. Bruce once held a parliament in it. Now it is tenanted chiefly by the mortal remains of that Third James who took flight from Sauchieburn, and whose ghost so haunted his nobles for years after. Queen Margaret also lies here, she who sat stitching, stitching, stitching, while those same nobles raged through Linlithgow and sought their king. Cambuskenneth—the name is splendid—is but a remnant of grandeur. But there are a few charming cottages nearby, rose-embowered, perhaps with roses that descend from those in Mary's garden.
Across to the north is the Bridge of Allan, come to be a celebrated watering place—
"On the banks of Allan Water
None so fair as she."
Far across to the north is Dunblane, with a restored-ruined cathedral—
"The sun has gone down o'er the lofty Ben Lomond
And left the red clouds to preside o'er the scene,
While lanely I stray in the calm simmer gloamin'
To muse on sweet Jessie the flower o' Dunblane."
DOUNE CASTLE.
In the green nestle of the woods, away to the right, are the battlements of Doune—