Stirling Castle [antikvár]

The Royal Abbey ol Augustinian Canons ai Cambuskenneth.The Argyll Lodging, Stirling, town house of the Earls (later Dukes) of Argyll.The town of Stirling and the Military Prison írom 2 the Forework.A Short HistoryStirling and Edinburgh are perhaps the two castles which are most closely identified with the secular history of Scotland. Those who have visited them will recognise a number of features in common, both in the nature of their sites, and in the way that the various structures have been laid out. Each castle occupies a secure volcanic outcrop, which has been made even more easily defensible by the scraping of glaciers in the Ice Ages. (This same action has in each case left a gentle tail-like ridge at one end of the outcrop, along which a dependant town could develop.) In addition both castles were favoured residences of successive Scottish Kings, who progressively rebuilt in the prevailing taste of their times to meet expanding needs, andin a number of cases rebuilding of particular features must have taken place simultaneously within the two.For much of the middle ages the effective capital of the kingdom was wherever the King happened to be in residence, and as a result the town of Stiriing, like Edinburgh, shows many of the characteristics of a medieval capital. Both were provided with fine parish churches, which eventually achieved collegiate status. Both also had a magnificent royal abbey of Augustinian canons founded in the vicinity by David I: Cambuskenneth at Stirling, and Holyrood at Edinburgh. A further likeness between the two may be seen in the surviving portions of aristocratic town houses which gathered like moths around the light sources of the royal residences, of which the Argyll Lodging and Mar's Wark at Stiriing are the best remaining examples.The positioning of a royal castle was not, of course, a matter of random choice, and at Stiriing the decision to fortify the rock was dictated by the supreme stratégie importance of the area. Set at the highest navigable point of the Forth, and on the line of the main pass through the hills from the north, it guarded both the principal north-south and east-west routesacross Scotland. The coincidence of strategic significance and naturally strong site could hardly have been a happierone