Castle of Dromore
Trip Start
May 19, 2008
1
6
24
Trip End
Jun 02, 2008
Stirling,
Scotland,
United Kingdom
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
It is a strange feeling to stand in the huge rooms, open to the air above, and know that royalty lived here. The halls were mostly empty today, with only a few tourists. Voices carried in a strange way here. I'd be in a hall with no one in sight, and could hear voices, but with no sense of how near or far they were. Sometimes, they seemed very distant, and suddenly someone would come around a corner. There were lots of halls, stairways, and chambers far below to explore
A little fireplace at Linlithgow Palace
. Every now and again, I'd find cobwebs, or a bird would suddenly cry out, and go flapping through the empty room. Stirling-- Bannockburn Heritage Center and the Battlefield of Bannockburn. At Bannockburn, Robert the Bruce routed the English army, rumored to be the largest the world had ever seen, an army which stretched 20 miles as it traveled. Andrew and I both tried on a very heavy replica of Robert the Bruce's war helmet, with a crown on the top and heavy chain mail hanging down. We looked at the exhibit and walked around the battlefield where a flag marks the spot that Robert the Bruce planted the flag of Scotland after sending Edward of England running. ("We sent him home to think again," as the song says.)
We talked at length with Joe who showed me where the re-enactments are held. They have up to 5,000 people take part in these re-enactments. He also showed me a six foot tall aerial map of the Bannockburn area and explained why, despite the eye-witness descriptions of the battle, there is doubt over where the second day's events really occurred. It may be where the high school is now built. Without a doubt, though, there is a neighborhood built up over much of the landscape where the Battle of Bannockburn, one of the greatest victories in Scottish history, was fought
A Roof With a View
.We went on the hop-on-hop-off bus tour, where we saw various parts of Stirling, including the church of St. Ninian's and the bridge where the Battle of Stirling Bridge was fought and rode up to the William Wallace Monument.
The battle at Stirling Bridge is another incredible victory in Scottish history. It was the first time foot soldiers prevailed over cavalry . William Wallace waited (amazingly alliteratively) till half the British army had crossed the bridge before moving his army in on them. The rest of the British were trapped on the bridge or across the river Forth.
Andrew, Sarah, and I went on the Mary King's Close tour, which took us under the city of Stirling to houses that had been built over a couple of hundred years ago. It was quite sad to see how hard life was in the 1600's and onward, as we heard the stories of people who had lived there.
We saw a display of a woman, her mother, and her husband, whom her mother had just beaten over the head, and somewhat inadvertently killed, because he finally demanded that she pay the dowry for her daughter which she had promised
Courtyard Fountain, Linlithgow Castle
. The mother was drowned in the loch at the bottom of the street-- that's the same loch where all the raw sewage, thrown from the houses each morning and evening, drained, leading our tour guide to suggest that of all the places you'd want to drown, this was most likely the very last. She also went on to point out that the loch was eventually filled in and Princes Street Gardens now grow where it stood. No wonder they're so beautiful, she said, with the things that were in that loch fertilizing them!We saw the 'houses,' not much bigger than one of today's average sized bedrooms, where eight to eleven people would live, and the city stalls, in amongst the houses, where the cattle lived and were even butchered. We saw another room set up as the home of a family-- complete with life-like mannequins-- seized by the plague. The doctors of the time wore long cloaks, leather gloves, and a beaked mask, with the beak filled with herbs to ward off the bad smells that they believed carried the plague. These costumes must have been terrifying to a child. The irony is that they did keep the doctors from getting the plague, but because they kept off the fleas which really carried it, not because of the sweet-smelling herbs in the beaks.
A final interesting stop on the tour was the home of a very wealthy man-- so wealthy, in fact, that he had his own indoor toilet, rather than just a chamber pot. He was so proud of it and the wealth it conveyed, that he placed it in a room at the end of the hall where it could clearly be seen by anyone coming to the front door. When the decision was made to tear down everything above the fourth floor on these particular streets and build a government building on top of them, he was forced to leave his house, as it became an underground dwelling. But since there was no law against working underground, he continued to travel into this netherworld of now- underground streets for many more years, to his workshop.
