‘He who holds Stirling, holds Scotland’, so the maxim goes. A quote that should be attributed to a historic figure, or a pithy statement made by a historian that has caught on? Who knows? What we do know, is that one must only look at the number of battles that took place on and around the city’s soil in the medieval era to see how true this statement once was.
Stirling has been a royal residence since at least the reign of Alexander I, who was known to have dedicated a chapel within the castle grounds in 1110, and in 1124, King David I made it a Royal Burgh, firmly underlining its significance as a royal centre.
Though medieval Scotland’s royal centres swapped between Stirling, Dunfermline, Falkland, and Inverness often from the 12th century through to the Union of the Crowns with England in 1603, almost every Scottish king or queen had some association with Stirling and its castle, whether they lived there, died there, or were crowned there.
