ABSTRACT

GO AND STAND ON the castle rock of Stirling and look about you. That is the quickest way to comprehend the basic features that have dictated Scottish history. You will see the Highland line, one of the great geological faults to which Scotland owes its shape, a wall of hills rising sharply from the plain a few miles to the north. It runs as an irregular diagonal across the country. To the north-east lies its screen of outliers, the Ochils. Above the main ridge individual mountains, those of three thousand feet, Ben Ledi, Ben Vorlich, Ben Lomond, overlook their fellows. To the north-west runs the flat and now fertile carse with the great golden corn stacks and haystacks in ranks perpendicular to the road. But, for our ancestors, before the improvers of the eighteenth century drained it, this carse land was a bog covered with peat, across which the little sluggish streams took themselves to supply the still tidal Forth. The river Forth comes through Stirling in a series of big loops, and, four miles to the east as a hypothetical crow might fly, but many more as a boat’s crew would row, it widens into the arm of the sea, its firth. South of Stirling the wall of the Highlands is reflected by the lesser ridge of the Campsies. To pass in reasonable safety and comfort from southern to northern Scotland a man must cross the Forth within a mile or two of Stirling. Stirling is the brooch that holds together the two parts of the country. It is right that the most decisive battle in Scottish history should have been planned and agreed to for the ownership of Stirling castle on its rock above the vital bridge. Scotland as we know it began when the various peoples that made up the medieval population linked together with the aid of this brooch. The division to be overcome was not the modern cultural and economic one between Highland and Lowland but the older one between north and south of the Forth.