Stirling: Not just a kind of silver if you spell it different

Day 17, continued again!: Into Stirling

Heading out of Doune, I biked into Stirling to see Scotland’s biggest and most famous castle. Stirling was a bit urban to camp in, so I scoured the streets for a hostel and found one, the Willy Wallace Hostel.

The door was secured, and there was no employee in sight. Eventually after ringing the bell I got ahold of a heavily accented voice (and the accent was not Scottish). They agreed to let me up and have a room.

The alien owners seemed to not have very polished procedures for intaking guests. The dorm had about 12 beds and one other resident, a Scottish doctor returned from abroad to renew his passport who liked to walk around wearing only a towel. The following day, I would meet some people who used to stay in the Hostel and learned that really, it was mostly a halfway home, with only a few guests coming in to stay. So much made sense then.

Nearby was a fishy where at long last I was able to try that fabled Scottish food: deep-fried pizza!

It was all right.

And … nearby was an BrewDog bar. Did you know this beer was Scottish? Well, it is Scottish!

Here it is. The friendly employee told me the employees don’t really pick the employee picks!
Damn tasty wings.

Day 18: A day of seeing things

I wanted to pretty much do what there was to do in Sterling on this day and I cam pretty close. I biked up a few km to the William Wallace Monument, built in 1869 as a monument to Rob Roy. Just kidding! It’s actually a monument to William Wallace.

  • On a big hill just to make biking their extra good exercise
  • The hard way up (I took the stairs)
  • William Wallace’s ACTUAL sword
  • The Hall of Heroes – they give a shout out to other cool Scottish people too
  • Walking about the top
  • The top
  • Excellent bathroom service

I biked on down to old Stirling Bridge. This wasn’t the original wooden bridge from the Battle of Stirling Bridge from Braveheart times- that was destroyed during that battle. This was the rebuilt version from the 1700s. Still looks cool.

Next I spent a good few hours touring the very large, very touristed, very historical Stirling Castle.

  • Not even guarded!
  • The place is full of old catacombs and nooks
  • They had some scenes of olden times recreated
  • I chatted with this character actor a good long while about ancient beauty products. Takeaway: urine, urine, urine.
  • Gardens
  • Halls
  • Thrones
  • Double meaning! Could be taken to refer to King Charles I or to James VI.
  • View of WW Monument
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So, one cool thing they had was a modern tapestry. They don’t really make tapestries like they used too; they’re very labor intensive and we find better things to do with our time now. But this time, they did. Weavers weaved for years to make a reconstruction of an old timey tapestry (not quite one from Stirling Castle, but from somewhere else).

  • Here the court prepares for a hunt.
  • Look! They found a unicorn!
  • They have a poke at said unicorn
  • The unicorn strikes back
  • But to no avail. Here it is dead.
  • And here the Virgin brings it back to life.
  • And now it’s happy and tamed. Apparently this story would have made a lot of sense to medieval audience.

Had lunch at a decent Peri Peri chicken place. They like Peri Peri in Scotland. Oh and that weird soda, Irn Bru, is a big Scottish thing.

Next, I took a self-guided tour of the Stirling Old Town Jail. The guided tours were disrupted because they were filming a movie or something there.