Forests and Castles

Do you all remember that hill that I pointed out in the video of my flat? No? Well, it's there, whether you remember or not. I can see it from my window, and from just about anywhere on campus. It's just opposite the Wallace Monument and appearently it's called Dumiat hill/mountain. (Given that Ben Nevis is the tallest at only 4000 something feet, I guess this little guy counts for something.)

Regardless of it's classification, a couple weeks ago I decided to hike it. Here's a picture of it from the road I was on. I think I took the long way to get there, but I wasn't really going for a speed record anyway.


About half way to the top, here's looking back onto my campus. Unfortunately, it started getting dark before I made it to the top, and I wanted to get back down while it was still light out. This means I still haven't made it to the top, but I'm sure I still will. I've got plenty of time, I just need to wait for the weather to agree.

On another adventure, I went to see the Stirling Castle. Now, this was the home of the royalty for a number of years and because of that, Stirling was considered the historic capital of Scotland. Because of it's size however, Edinburgh became the capital when it was time to make it official. But, back to the pretty pictures.


On my way to the castle, I passed through what used to be the front of a big mansion things. I think it was the external wall of the grounds, rather than an actual wall of the building itself. It had this awesome gate in front of it though, and behind the gate there is a quiet little graveyard. Very pretty, especially the way it is built in a very hilly, rocky area, so there is a craig jutting out in the middle of the graveyard with a couple of benches on top.

This was one of the statue memorials in the graveyard. I loved the way the vines are crawling up it though, and right next to it there was another memorial completely overtaken by the growth. Really cool.

I did finally make it to the Castle itself and was pretty impressed. As you can see, it's built right on the edge of a frickin cliff. Pretty strong natural defence I would say.

A lot of the castle was in pretty good shape, having been rebuilt and maintained a lot recently. In fact, the palace building (residence for the King and Queen as well as recieving chambers) was surrounded by scaffolding while I was there because they are taking billions of pictures and measurements so that they can monitor its decay from weather and such, and keep it in good shape for as long as possible.





I enjoyed the less rebuilt areas, like the underground storage areas. I was confused by the height of the doors though, becuase they only were about 5'-6" tall. Were people that much smaller back then? Or maybe they just didn't care about their comfort so much in a room like this.




Speaking of rebuilt though, they had the funniest setup in the kitchens! They created a little mock scene of what it might have looked like back in the day when it was used. It was kinda cool, but really more creepy than anything with all the statues stairing at you and falling apart themselves.


There was also a building further away from the castle but still inside the main wall where they had setup a tapestry room, and where there we're people actually weaving a duplicate of the tapestry "The Hunt of the Unicorn." It was really impressive. Huge too. And they had to weave it sideways, which seemed a lot hard to me.

There was a lot of other stuff too, but as always pictures just don't do it justice, so you'll just have to come visit and see for yourself!

I will leave you with this amazing picture of the castle in its entire glory with an amazing full rainbow over head. I got this picture on the way back from a day trip out to Loch Lomond, which you'll hear about in the next post! (Also coming up, Paris pics!)