The Wallace Monument

Last week I went to visit the William Wallace Monument, which is literally a 30 minute walk from my room. I went with Celeste, one of the other IFSA students, and when we got there, there was a little visitors’ center and this cool statue.




















The visitors’ center wasn't too exciting, so we started along a paved trail/road leading up the hill (I later learned there was a convenient shuttle service to the base of the monument. Now if only they could find a way to get me up that spiral staircase . . .) However, after about 5 minutes of walking, we came to a split off trail (a real trail this time, non of this paved crap.) and a little sign post that showed the trail systems. It looked like this split off would go around a little bit longer but give us some cool views, so I decided to take it. Little did I know that had I continued on the paved road, I would have been at the monument in about 5 more minutes. Instead, we started walking through the forest. And walked some more. And then some more. As far as I could tell, we just kept heading further and further away from the monument. There were a bunch of forks in the trail, and I did my best to take the ones that I thought headed towards the monument, but I was also keeping track in my mind so that I could follow the trail back and get to somewhere familiar if need be. Finally, we came out on the far opposite side of the hill. We had literally walked all the way around the monument. Awesome. Anyway, to cut my meandering story short, we finally made it, paid our £4.90 entrance fee, collected our big red interactive audio devices, and sat down to watch this hilarious informative skit of a "common soldiers perspective of the battle of Stirling." It was pretty hilarious, but the guy was really nice and into it.
























After that, climbing the beast was all we had left to do. 5 levels, and the tiniest spiral staircase ever.












Each level had a display of some sort with information about Wallace, or the Monument, or some other famous Scots. On one of the levels, there was this really cool setup with a video playing on one wall of the trail against Wallace and against the other wall was a mannequin with a cloth face and they had projected the recorded image of someone talking onto the mannequin! It create a pretty realistic 3D talking statue effect. I have a video of it if anyone is interested. On the same level was a display case with William's huge sword. I unfortunately didn't get a picture of this, but from the side of the case you could see that the sword was really badly bent.





















And here's the view of our campus from the top of the monument. It's a lot cooler in person, but this gives you an idea.











Oh, and if you want to, you can check out Celeste's blog on the same subject.

Love yall!!