A Picture of Stirling by Robert Chambers

STIRLING, the capital of the county of the same name, the seat of a presbytery, and one of the oldest royal burghs in Scotland, is a town of about nine thousand inhabitants, situated upon an eminence near the river Forth, thirty-five miles north-west of Edinburgh, and about twenty-seven north-east of Glasgow. It is in 56 degrees 12 minutes north latitude, and 3 degrees 50 minutes west longitude from London. It is a place little noted for manufacture or commerce, although not altogether destitute of these advantages, the weaving of carpets, of tartans, and of cotton goods, having long flourished in it to a considerable extent, and the Forth being navigable up to the town for vessels of small burden. It is chiefly for its antiquities and the interesting historical associations connected with them, together with the singularly delightful circumstances of its situation, that Stirling is remarkable, in the eyes of either the native of Scotland or the foreign tourist.

_First_, as to Situation. It occupies a central place in the southern moiety of Scotland, where the rivers Forth and Clyde contract the country into a narrow isthmus, the greater part of which is rendered impassable by a barrier of mountains, and which the Romans at one time completely fortified by a ditch and wall. Situated, with its castle, on a hill overlooking the only place where the mountains and river permitted this isthmus to be traversed, Stirling was, at an early time, a place of such importance as to be dignified with the epithet of ‘the Key of the Highlands,' implying that it could open or obstruct the passage to that region at its pleasure. For this reason, the neighbourhood of the town abounds in fields of strife; at least a dozen, some of them the most remarkable in Scottish history, being pointed out from the walls of the castle. It used to be remarked of Stirling, that it was the only place in Scotland which could be approached, in any thing like a direct line, from any other part of the country, _without crossing an arm of the sea_; a fact which will be made plain to the reader by a glance at a map of Scotland, where he will not fail to observe, that all the principal roads of a longitudinal direction, have a confluence at Stirling, parting off at no great distance in all other directions. But, perhaps, the importance which the town formerly derived from this circumstance, could not be better illustrated than by a reference to the events of the insurrection of 1715, the whole of which turned upon the successful defence of the bridge by the Duke of Argyll; who thus, with only about fifteen hundred men, prevented an army, supposed, at one time, to have numbered ten thousand, from descending upon the low country.