9 Key Events That Shaped Stirling: Part 1 Before the Burgh
Guest blog post by Dr Murray Cook, Archaeologist
As part of the Stirling 900 celebrations I’ve been asked for my personal selection of the 9 events that shaped Stirling before the burgh and then a further 9 events that shaped the burgh!
1 Fire and Ice
The scale of geological time is mindboggling. Stirling’s Castle Rock, Craigforth and Abbey Craig are all volcanic, formed from 400 million year old intrusive flows of magma. Scorching flows of lava spread across where the Forth would be and flowed down the northern side of the Ochils sealing fossil beds and layers and layers of coal, these having formed when Scotland lay at the equator in warm shallow seas. Fragments of these of fossils turn up from time to time where people have quarried and dug. But if you really want to see a fossilised sea bed, walk up the Bannockburn to Swallowhaugh (274575, 687674) where it has carved through the geological strata to the underlying fossilised shell beds – it is absolutely astonishing.
Around 360-260 million years ago Stirling sat in the middle of a rift valley. The line of the fault is the south-facing scarp of the Ochils and the area where the Forth now flows drops by 3-5km, all of which was sealed during the ice age. The fault is still active and every few years there is an earthquake, though very small – just enough to wake people up in the night.
This rugged landscape was in turn buried by tonnes of ice. There was at least 1km of glacier above our fair city, grinding, crushing and pushing. Indeed, the ice was so heavy that it depressed all of Scotland (a bit like the football/rugby results), and we’re still recovering – while you read this piece you have become slightly higher, thanks to a process called isostatic bounce. The last of the ice melted 10,000 years which created the moraines at Callander (well worth a look. This melted ice filled the Lake of Menteith and indeed the whole of the Forth Valley. This vast lost sea slowly drained as Scotland bounced back, becoming a bog so people could only live on the high ground. Sometimes, if not dry, it was just enough to stop the farm being washed away, so we get Falleninch, or Inchie or Inch of Leckie (derived from the Gaelic ‘innis’ for island, or, in this case, just slightly higher ground). Thus all the old places in Stirling are on the high ground, (Stirling, Dunblane, Cowie and Kippen) while the new ones are all on the low ground (Raploch, Cornton and Plean).
Anyway, this diversion into geology was to show you what I uncovered in July 2019 when digging a 2000 year old fort in the King’s Park. I thought at first these were tool marks from gouging out the rock for a defensive ditch, but they went into the sands and gravels, so they couldn’t be archaeology. In Scotland all the sands and gravels date to after the last ice age. So these marks were caused by something huge and lumbering and over 10,000 years old. I think this is the scouring of the King’s Park’s solid geology by a glacier, the same one that smoothed out Dumyat. Now while I am not a bible literalist, or a practising Christian even I can find the divine in such a majestic process.
2 The Gargunnock Whale
Whale bone at the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum
The coastline of this lost sea (which people until at least the 13th century still thought existed and called it the Sea of Scotland) is still visible today. You can see its coastline at the King’s Knot, Abbey Craig, Blair Drummond, Balquidderock, just above Gargunnock and below Thornhill and Kippen. Just stop and look – if you travel west from Stirling you drop down onto the Carse and if you look north or south it’s all flat, a vast great plain: a lost sea bed.
And of course where there is a sea, there is a tide and something to eat, crabs, mussels, limpets, cockles, seaweed, wading birds, deer eating the seaweed and the odd beached whale. There were people in Scotland before the ice retreated because there was always something to eat in the sea, all you had to do was follow the coast. We were just like any other animal. For hundreds and thousands of years we bred and we spread, our clever fingers and brains figuring out how to survive. We moved from the African plains to the Mediterranean, then to Spain, France, England and then finally Scotland. These, our earliest ancestors, followed resources into the hills during the summer and then went back to the coast in the winter. We don’t know their names or what language they spoke, their lives were ‘nasty, brutish and short’, most would die in their twenties due to the harshness of life at the time: a cut or an infection could be fatal, bears and other predators hunted them as they hunted deer and child birth was incredibly risky, but they survived and prospered and eventually led to us.
Drainage works in the 1870s at Woodyett uncovered the skull and skeleton of a Rorqual whale, a classification that covers several species which range in size from nine tonnes to 120 tonnes. The Smith Museum and Art Gallery contains some of the bones and they look to me like a smaller species. Looking in detail at these bones you can see a series of gouges in them.
These are tool marks and while some of them may be from the workers who uncovered the skeleton it’s likely that most will be from our Mesolithic ancestors, hacking and carving the whale’s flesh, preparing an enormous feast – so enormous that they couldn’t possibly eat it all before it started to rot. We know this because one of them lost their tool: a roughly 7000 year old red deer antler beam mattock, currently on display in National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The Smith Museum and art Gallery has some similar examples. Presumably, this whale butchering would have happened fairly regularly, but what did our ancestors think these whales were?
3 Stirling’s First Hunter
This story concerns a 6000 year old flint arrowhead fired at unknown target in what would become Stirling’s Kings Park (NS 78839 92918), the oldest and best preserved Royal Park in Scotland founded in the 12th century. The park is now full of dog walkers, families at play and golfers but its long history contains World War I practice trenches, a 19th century firing range and a Celtic Iron Age fort built when Stirling was part of the Roman Empire.
Prior to all that it was simply a hill above a vast inland loch, as 6000 years ago the Forth was higher with dolphins and whales swimming over what is now farmland. This leaf shaped arrowhead was found by me as I monitored a new track being constructed through the park. The sparkling white of the flint contrasted with the dull brown of the mud. It had clearly been fired at something or someone and missed, lost in brush and undergrowth. What we do not know is what or who it was fired at….a deer for the pot or a rival from a different tribe, intent on poaching? Perhaps the aggressor was the poacher. The arrow dates from the Neolithic (from before Bronze and Iron) when in theory our ancestors had taken up farming and abandoned hunting and gathering, so perhaps the arrow reflects a conflict between newly established farmers and older populations defending their seasonal hunting grounds? Certainly across Neolithic Europe bows and arrows were used in conflict between people, but we will never know precisely who fired the arrow at what.
4 The Arrival of Roman Eagles
As you all know the Roman Empire tried and failed three times to conquer Scotland and while we were very hard to handle (the Antonine Wall which is half the length of Hadrian’s Wall took the same number of troops… making it the densest staffed frontier in the Roman World) the tax returns didn’t justify the costs…there really wasn’t enough to steal from our wee bit hill and glen!
But and its a very big but, the Roman’s did leave behind their roads a wonderful asset used for the next 2000 years. The Road in Beechwood Park (NS 79278 92015) was walked on by everyone from General Agricola to Butcher Cumberland including Celts, Picts, Angles, Vikings, Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, Bruce, Wallace, James I, James II, James III, James IV, James V, Mary Queen of Scots, James VIth, Bonnie Prince Charlie and Robert Burns! And then it became the back garden of Beechwood house.
5 The End of Manau
Dumyat The Former Capitol of Manau
Stirling’s ragged northern horizon is dominated by Dumyat, a low rounded lump of a hill above a 418m high cliff caused by a 400 million year old fault line. The Maeatae were the local tribe who challenged Rome but the actual fort (Castle Law) is little to the south-west, a smaller peak but much more defendable. The Maeatae were also mentioned in the Life of Columba and they lost a bloody conflict with a king of Dal Riata in the 580s. Dumyat is one of two Maeatae placenames, the other being Myot Hill in Falkirk. Clearly the Maeatae dominated the Forth crossings at Stirling. This would have been the jewel of Manau, perhaps the darkest of Scotland’s lost kingdoms. It is first mentioned in Roman sources and lastly in the Battle of the Plain of Manau in 711. It gives its name to Clackmannan and Slamannan, but there are also Manau names in Balfron and West Lothian and to the north it probably ran to the Earn.
A famous poem from around 600 AD The War Band’s Return, recounts a cattle raid on Manau from Galloway. The fort itself is vitrified meaning its stone ramparts were set fire to and the scorching inferno reached such a high temperature that the stones melted and fused. An incredible statement of regime change, the smoke would be visible across the whole Forth Valley and the fiery eye of destruction even further at night. But who destroyed it? The Dal Riatan’s or the Angles or perhaps even the Picts? Murray led the first excavation of the site and this indicated activity between the 5th to early 7th centuries and this would fit any of them. Of course to be fired the fort first had to be captured….can you imagine the nervous defenders watching the slow steady arrival of attackers and their sheer terror when the gates fell and the enemy swarmed over hearth and home?
6 A Pictish Massacre
The Site of the Ford at Drip
This story concerns the first rebellion of the Picts against the control of the invading Angles who conquered Stirling around 650 and concerns the Battle of The Two Rivers in 671. The battle is mentioned in the Life of St Wilfrith and describes a clash between a Pictish King, assumed to be Drest and the Northumbrian King Ecgfrith. The battle took place between two rivers and so great was the Northumbrian victory that the rivers were blocked by Pictish corpses and you could walk across them dry shod.
The location of the battle is unknown and several candidates have been suggested but Drip which sits next to both a meander in the Forth and the Teith’s confluence fits the evidence and as it lies on the assumed Roman road is the likely route of a Northumbrian invasion. Gruesomely, if the fighting extended across the ford then it would not have taken too many corpses to walk dry shod across. The Picts would not endure the bitter taste of defeat for long and in 685 at the Battle of Dunnichen they pushed the Northumbrians to the Forth. The Picts and Northumbrians clashed twice more, an unnamed battle of 698, and finally The Battle of The Plain of Manau 711 (between the Avon and the Carron) and presumably the Roman road and ford at Drip (NS 76978 95600) was used each time…did the Picts stop to remember their fallen comrades?
7 Viking Raiders
The Abbey Craig from the Forth
The Abbey Craig (NS 80796 95771) is of course more famous as the home of the National Wallace Monument, the largest memorial to an individual in Britain. But round its base are traces of a double rampart system which like Dumyat was destroyed by fire and subsequently vitrified. The radiocarbon dates indicate that it was destroyed in the 7th to 10th centuries AD. This is contemporary with post Dunnichen settlement when the Pictish border with the Northumbrians became the Forth, so perhaps it was built to defend the frontier and destroyed in an Anglian raid? Another option is the Battle of Dollar in 875 when Danish Vikings led by Thorstein defeated the King of Picts Constantine I who died two years later fighting another Norse invasion. It’s likely that the Great Army had marched north perhaps over the Drip or Abbott Fords. After Dollar the Vikings rampaged for a year and may even have built some permanent settlement. So might the fort have been built to defend against Viking raids….or perhaps even built by the Vikings to control their newly carved out sword land?
There are certainly local indications of Viking settlement: Logie old kirk just to the north of Abbey Craig contains fragments of up to four hogbacks which while not Viking burial monuments are likely to have been used by the children or grandchildren of Vikings. One of these two complete hogbacks lies north to south, while the other lies east to west, according to Christian tradition and may reflect the conversion of the Vikings to Christianity. It is likely that there was a small short lived and unrecorded Viking kingdom centred on Abbey Craig that no doubt used the Forth to raid both north and south. These raids ultimately destabilised Pictland to such an extent that it rebranded itself with Irish Dal Riatan identity as Alba.
8 William The Conqueror
As they every cloud has a silver lining. At the time of William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066. Britain comprised five different polities: Alba (which would become Scotland), England, Strathclyde, Wales and Northumbria. Northumbria is hard to pin down: the modern English County and the Scottish Borders and the Lothians.
William’s invasion caused the collapse of Northumbria which was gobbled up from both the north and the south. Scotland’s king Malcolm III began to exercise influence south of the Forth over Strathclyde and that portion of Northumbria north of the Tweed. He even married into the former English Royal family, the one displaced by Cnut (yes….the tide one!). His intentions were very clear as the children of his new bride (the future St Margaret) all had English, Classical or biblical names while his older children from his first wife all had Gaelic names. His new children were heirs to both the Scottish and English thrones. This of course raised a few eyebrows in London as did Malcolm’s raiding into Northumbria. So in in 1072 William launched an invasion and crossed the Forth and made his way to Abernethy where Malcolm took the knee.
Now the reason that this is important is that William used a ford and not a bridge. There wasn’t one as the Forth was both the formal frontier and the best ally the Scots had. While this seems like a disaster for Malcolm and his children in just over 50 years Scotland’s border would be the Tweed and Malcolm’s granddaughter would be Queen of England!
9 The First Castle at Stirling
Slowly but surely Malcolm and his children pushed south and during Alexander I’s reign (1107-1124) there is the first record of a castle at Stirling. Strictly speaking the record concerns the founding of a chapel at the castle, which means perhaps that Alexander’s elder brother Edgar could’ve founded it. This castle should be understood as a bridgehead into Northumbria and Scotland’s back door. It protected the crossings over the Forth but also could be used to attack further south. Clearly Alexander liked it there as he died there in 1124. Quite what this castle looked like is unclear but it was probably located around the Douglas Gardens and the core of the King’s Old Buildings. Famously this wad the one that was burnt down by Robert The Bruce after he won the Battle of Bannockburn.
Part 2 will explore the creation of the burgh and what happened next!