1

Stirling

After a brief exchange of pleasantries with the rental car agent and reminders of the differences between American English and Scottish English (the luggage goes into the boot, not the trunk, and the engine is housed under the bonnet, not the hood), and armed with directions to a nearby mobile phone store, I departed Edinburgh Airport to begin my journey. Thirty minutes later I was back at the airport after driving in a narrowing series of circles in hopeless search of the exit to the phone store, a trip made all the more exciting by the necessity of driving on the wrong side of the road.

The day was warm with temperatures near seventy, but I was sweating like a high schooler on exam day after attempting to negotiate one roundabout after another, keeping my car in the correct lane while searching for the proper exit. I didn’t spot a person I could ask for help, although, as an overconfident male I’d never descend to actually asking anyone for directions. Besides, I couldn’t find any place to slow the car, so help was out of the question. The thought did occur to me that in a bizarre way this experience was related to some unanticipated problems encountered by Boswell and Johnson, and that we were already becoming united by a similarity of travel stresses. Either that or I was getting tired really fast.

After nearly an hour of this foolishness, asking myself how important could a mobile phone be, I spotted a sign to Stirling, my planned first night’s stop, and I abandoned plans for phoning in favor of a shower, some clean clothes, food, and a wee dram of Scotch. The M9 and M80 obliged, and with growing levels of confidence and weariness, I drove to my refuge near the base of the commanding presence that is Stirling Castle.

My home for the night would be an attractive, two-story bed and breakfast tucked into the side of the mountain of Stirling Castle Rock, several hundred feet below the castle walls. It certainly felt safe. It was operated by a pleasant couple; he offered to help me get my bags into the room, and she offered helpful advice about getting around the neighborhood. It would be the last time I would see him. He remained glued to the telly for football the entire period of my stay. Boswell and Johnson never got to Stirling, unfortunately, so I was on my own for a bit, shaking jet lag and getting to know this small piece of Scotland better.

This was not my first trip to Scotland—that occurred about thirty years ago when I spent ten days in Tayside, perambulating around some castles and historic scenery while demonstrating a keen knowledge of single malts. I was in the company of a small group of mean-spirited travel writers who seemed to regard me with nearly as much affection as Norwegians lavish on the Germans. In a bus in Oslo several years ago, a German couple boarded, speaking their native language. I’m not sure they heard the driver call them “fucking Nazi whores.” I later asked the driver why he was so upset. “Ever heard of the Second World War?” he snarled back to me. There are a lot of long memories out there, obviously. My travel writer companions played a nasty trick, cashing in on my naiveté (witless even by ordinary standards of naiveté) when we visited gorgeous Blair Castle to meet its owner, the duke of Atholl. The duke was a delightful man, charming in a nonfussy sort of way, and rather laid back. Asking my “friends” how I should properly address the duke, I was told by several that I should be certain to call him Duke. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” they reassured me, suppressing giggles I ignored.

And so, when my turn arrived I stepped forward and confidently, even loudly, blurted out, “Good morning, Duke.” Not “Your Lordship.” Not “Sir.” Not nothing at all. Just “Good morning, Duke.” It remains a low point in a life filled with them, and I still hear the raucous laughter from the writers as clearly as I see the duke’s raised eyebrows and startled, then half-smiling response. He was a really nice duke, but can you say cringe?

Mercifully, let me change the subject. My first evening’s dinner in Scotland took place in a small stone pub located a few feet higher up on the rock. No bangers and mash here, just garlic chicken, perfectly roasted, with a side of fresh beans. It was not to be the last gustatory treat I’d find in Scottish restaurants. There was one slightly curious moment when I realized the music being piped in was not Scottish. In fact it was Glen Campbell, tune after tune after tune, followed by Ricky Nelson and the Byrds in an all-American 1960s pop fest, sounding ever more odd in a pub almost inside a centuries-old castle.

After dinner I drove to a grocery about a mile away to load up on water and snacks. The weather, curiously warm and sunny on my arrival, by now had collapsed into a very chilly rain followed by a drizzle and then by a hard rain. In the store I was paying for my stash when the cashier stopped and asked about my accent. “You from the States?” she inquired with her own Scottish accent. “I’ve got friends in Mount Pleasant near Charleston in South Carolina. You know them?” Well, no, but I lived for forty years in South Carolina and discovering a connection to the state through a cashier in the middle of Scotland was not what I had anticipated within my first hours in this country. And yes, I know, it’s a very small world. And so, as Mr. Pepys put it, to bed. And to dream right through a lunar eclipse, a phenomenon that might have been construed as some sort of omen for my trip, had I been awake to know about it.

I awoke to a tasty Scottish breakfast of eggs, sausage, tomatoes, and tea. I would get used to that combination. Outside my window there was an interesting variety of wildlife: two owls on a tree, a fox lurking in the distance, and an unidentified rodent nearby. In the distance I could see a set of gorgeous snow-covered peaks. It was near freezing outside, but the rain had stopped. I decided first to resolve the issue with the phone, and my hostess directed me to a mall in downtown Stirling.

Because of the strategic importance of Stirling Castle through the centuries, the royal burgh of Stirling at its base has always been a thriving market. With the castle drawing half a million visitors each year, there’s a splendid opportunity for merchants to make a little money. I located the mall with ease and negotiated a parking place with some unease given that the lines seemed drawn to fit bicycles more than automobiles. It took me a moment to realize with embarrassment that I had in fact tried to park in a slot reserved for bicycles.

Inside the mall I found the phone store and several young clerks who spoke an incomprehensible language which occasionally sounded Scottish. As we discussed various phone cards, the first one seemed to be saying something like, “Yuk nae come t’ slip ’er here” while I repeatedly added, “What?” The first clerk then waved over a second clerk to better assist me. “Nae twim es ’er skurren?” he said pointing to the card. I figured they both must be immigrants from some bizarre planet until a just-arrived customer next to me explained, in a lovely, flowing brogue, “They’re from Glasgow.” With his assistance as translator, I got my phone card. I next acquired an umbrella and a toothbrush, decided I’d postpone the Glasgow portion of my trip until the very end, and headed for the castle as a cold rain began to fall.

Boswell certainly knew of the castle, and Johnson, too, given the pivotal role it has played in Scottish history and the seemingly endless conflicts between the Scots and the English. Over the years it has been both a fortress and a royal residence perched high on a rocky crag commanding the road linking the Highlands and Lowlands. For much of the last eight hundred years the surrounding lands have been swampy, and that, together with the rushing waters of the River Forth and the nearby mountain peaks, has made passage though this area pretty much at the pleasure of the occupants of the castle. The first known existence of a fortress on this site goes back to the twelfth century, though given its prominence—that’s a pun, in case you failed to notice—it was likely occupied well before then.

The buildings that now comprise the castle date to the 1400s and 1500s and offer a memorable impression of the architecture of medieval and Renaissance Scotland. The castle is a test for the slothful; its up and downs can take the breath away from the out-of-shape, but the views from the perimeter are always bracing. It must have given the soldiers stationed here an occasional lift; and since they used to wash their clothes in urine, I would imagine almost anything would perk up their spirits. My stroll through the castle came as winds buffeted the walls and cold rain poured down. It certainly kept the crowds down; there was no one else in sight as I ducked in and out of the buildings. At the gift shop I bought a guidebook and three tiny, single-shot bottles of single malts; who knew gift shops could be so gifted?

Stirling Castle and Edinburgh Castle are the two most formidable castles in this nation, and one look tells you why: location, location, location. They are very high up, and to enemies they must have appeared mighty and impregnable. Trying to storm either one would have been folly. Stirling played a critical role in the Scottish resistance to invaders from England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and for the next couple of centuries it was a royal residence. King James V was crowned in the castle in 1513; he probably didn’t remember much about it since he was seventeen months old at the time. Mary, queen of Scots, got her crown here in 1543. Once the kings departed—the English eventually won, you may know—the castle’s upkeep diminished, and it wasn’t until the twentieth century that efforts began to preserve and restore its undoubted grandeur.

Moving about between the showers, I walked through the courtyards, the royal apartments, the lovely Chapel Royal (which looks like but isn’t the chapel where Mary was crowned), and finally the Great Hall, the largest ever built in Scotland. It is a huge rectangular space clearly designed for celebrations and great state occasions. Until 1964 it had been used as a military barracks for men of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders; now workers are returning it to its former glory, and already visitors can sense some of its earlier magnificence. Outside the rain stopped, and I walked over to the edge of a wall to get a better view of the countryside; there was a rainbow in front of me, and within minutes another developed to the north, and moments later one appeared to the south as well. The weather began clearing, and within fifteen minutes the rain had ceased, the sun was out, and the wind dropped. They weren’t kidding when they said Scotland’s weather was changeable. And quickly.

The castle’s history and location have encompassed some of Scotland’s greatest—and worst—historical moments and personalities. Robert the Bruce, a celebrated king of the Scots, enjoyed a resounding triumph over the English at the famous battle of Bannockburn in 1314; the battle site is located just a short distance south of the castle. It was also home to the Stewarts (that would be the Jameses, not the Jimmys) and, of course, to Mary, queen of Scots, whose colorfully tragic life has made her a central figure in the burgeoning Scottish tourist industry. She was at the heart of clashes between the Scots and the English, between Catholics and Protestants, between the nobility and everyone else, and her life was filled with exciting fireworks until she was imprisoned in various castles and later beheaded by order of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I in 1587. Some of those fireworks—literally—occurred in Stirling Castle, which was the site of the first fireworks show in Scottish history when Mary celebrated the baptism of her son, Prince James, in 1566. While Mary’s historic significance is unquestioned, I should note that tourist operators in Scotland are not shy about connecting her to just about any place they can since it encourages more visitors to stop by. Americans do the same with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Elvis.

And speaking of icons, there is another Scottish figure impossible to overlook while you’re in Stirling, or anywhere else in Scotland these days. I’m speaking, of course, of William Wallace, the consummate Scottish hero, better known these days as Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. Of course there was a real Wallace, although actual information about him remains elusive, in part because he is a figure of the very distant past, and in part because almost everything we know about him contemporaneously derives from enemy sources. Their accounts, as you might imagine, are less than admiring. Bloody criminal, maybe, or thief and brigand. He was accused of everything but eating small English babies.

The real Wallace was born about 1270 and was a genuine hero who led an unexpectedly successful rebellion against the much larger occupying army of the nasty English King Edward I in 1297 in a battle at Stirling Bridge, just down the street from the Castle. He was a warrior, and he could be brutal, but by one account he was “a multilingual diplomat who was sent on embassies to France and Rome.” Stories about Wallace began to appear in print just a few years after his death. One of the better known and most popular is Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon, written in the 1440s, that gives us a portrait of Wallace: he had the body of a giant with a wild but pleasing look about him. He was “most liberal in his gifts, very fair in his judgments, most compassionate in comforting the sad, a most skillful counsellor, very patient when suffering, a distinguished speaker, who above all hunted down falsehood and deceit and detested treachery.” Now we know why he didn’t eat small English babies—clearly he was way too busy to have free time to munch on children.

Unfortunately his battlefield record was not unblemished. He had a rematch with King Edward’s army in 1298 at Falkirk, just a few miles from Stirling, and was defeated. The story is that Robert the Bruce played a big role in the failure of the Scots on that battlefield; defenders of Robert deny this vigorously. Wallace was an outlaw to the English, a man with a price on his head. Though the Scots eventually submitted to King Edward, the English finally seized Wallace—or he was betrayed, take your choice. Betrayal is big in Scottish history. He was taken to England to be torn limb from limb in 1305 on the eve of St. Bartholomew’s Fair at Smithfield, his remains said to be scattered around Scotland to discourage further disturbances. It was a terrible epiphany for Wallace, but he quickly became the greatest martyr in the cause of Scottish nationalism. He has been celebrated ever since. Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet, wrote in 1786, after a visit to one of Wallace’s alleged safe havens in Ayrshire, “my heart glowed with a wish to be able to make a Song on him equal to his merits.”

A few miles from Stirling Castle, near a bridge which is not the bridge where the battle was fought, is a five-story monument erected in the midnineteenth century commemorating Wallace. It’s an impressive sight. Nearby is a smaller adornment that appears to celebrate Mel Gibson. Much less impressive.

So let’s go ahead and confront the colossus that is Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. That figure is an inescapable fact of life in Scotland these days, the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in contemporary Scottish history and the biggest thing since Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite Rising over two and a half centuries ago. The 1995 film Braveheart won five Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director for Gibson. It made a mint worldwide and was a huge box-office smash in the United States and Scotland. It spawned a jump in the sales of kilts, brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to Scotland, and stoked the worst instincts of Scottish tourism entrepreneurs. (The Braveheart Museum at Loch Ness is in its own category as the most ghastly museum in the world, but please hold your eagerness to read about it until Boswell, Johnson, and I get to that vicinity in a few more chapters.)

The film was fun, I suppose, and informative in a way, but in the view of historians it emerges as a horrible concoction of half truths and total untruths, not entirely surprising given the paucity of genuine historical information. It was drawn in part from a poem about Wallace written in the late fifteenth century by a poet known colorfully as Blind Hary. The poem apparently had little truth to it, making it a fabulous source for the film. One historian recently observed that Blind Hary’s creation “is the greatest single work of imagination in early Scots poetry.” But before we all jump on the poor visually impaired scribe, I should note that other historians think there may be some factual elements in Hary’s work, though they concede his first name probably wasn’t Hary. (You can see some of the trouble with Scottish history here.)

No matter, and whatever the truth, lots of Scots and lots of others have praised Gibson and his film. It did neatly encapsulate one perspective on how the English have mistreated the Scots over the centuries, and it certainly gave new life to the Scottish Independent Party. The English may be forgiven for wondering why Gibson had it in for them since the film is unsparing in its treatment of English savagery, suggesting the Scots were bloody nasty only to pay back the English for their cruelty. History tells us that no one came away with clean hands. Nonetheless, Gibson, who has no family ties to Scotland, by the way, would seem to have assured Wallace—the man of the people—a preeminent position in the grail of Scottish mythology, a cup is already filled to overflowing.

And what of Robert the Bruce? For a long period, he was what Wallace has become today—the greatest national hero—having proclaimed himself king of Scotland in 1306 and having won the battle at Bannockburn over the King Edward II’s English army in 1314. The battle was one of the most decisive in Scottish history, and certainly one of the most decisive battles that Scotland actually managed to win. It led to Scotland’s independence, though before that conflict there had been questions about Robert’s devotion to Scottish freedom. Bruce himself died in 1327, and the shortlived Bruce dynasty ended a few decades later. Historians commemorated Bruce’s achievements with honor and praise, though declining support for the Scottish monarchy over the centuries continually eroded his reputation. The battlefield today boasts a visitor center and large equestrian statue of Robert that is viewed against the skyline of Stirling Castle. Incidentally there is still discussion about the precise location of the battlefield; things are seldom what they seem to be when it comes to getting a tight grip on history.

Back at my lodging, I was tired after a day of exploring. It was already evident that Scotland has a lot of history that I was going to need to digest to get the most out of my experience. But as long as there are gift shops selling single malts, I was confident that I was up to the task. As I fell asleep, I remember hearing the rain start up again. I pulled the blankets up a little closer and thought about the next morning’s forecast of snow. I think I dreamed about already experiencing six different climates in my mere twenty-four hours in Scotland.