Scotland #5: Stirling

So far the Scotland part of the title was pretty much a lie but this changes now 🎉

The horse-like sculptures are called Kelpies (similar to the Germanic nixie) and made children aware of the dangers of water.

We stayed inside an old school building that was remodeled to be used as a hotel and conference center. One neat detail was that they kept some of the names of the rooms such as the headmasters office that now houses a bar.

Since the pubs we wanted to enter didn’t allow dogs, we went for Korean Fried Chicken for dinner and it was super delicious. There we also noticed a can of Irn-Bru for the first time and Leonie dared to grab one. The taste of it can be described as very sweet and reminded us of childhood chewing gum. Apparently its super popular in Scotland and maybe we’ll see it more often from now on.

After a good night’s rest and some Scottish breakfast we went to Stirling Castle.

Stirling Castle

The castle itself has everything you would expect, a nice large hall where daily life happened. It features three ovens and thus was a welcome refuge and stark contrast to the Scottish weather outside.

Inside the Royal Palace there was the bedchambers of the King and Queen that were mostly used to chat with them in private. The real highlight there were the Stirling Heads on the ceiling of the King’s Presence Chamber.

These are portraits are made from carved out oak wood and typically show kings, queens or classical and Biblical figures that the royals wanted to be associated with.\ It wasn’t all royal though, even some of the close staff got were immortalized in the portraits.\ But to not only serious portraits were to be found. In order to show that they have humor, they added a jester to the mix.

Having the unicorn as the national animal of Scotland means that saw it everywhere. Even on one of the rooftops with golden horns (but they were too tiny to make their appearance here).

The weather was also good so we had a nice view from the castle in all directions.

But why stop at the first historic building when you can also take a look at another the same day?

Old Town Jail

The nice thing about this site was that they allowed dogs! So Cooper joined the short history lesson on how the jails evolved in Stirling over time.

We don’t have a lot of pictures here because the live performance given was too captivating.\ The gist of what happened was that in the beginning a lot of people were in the same cell and were tortured. This changed when they built the new jail and offered them ways to earn some money and learn new skills so they didn’t have to resort to stealing food again or other crimes.\ This worked really well (meaning relapse rate dropped by 40%) until the funding was cut piece by piece and the relapse rate started to climb again.

After these interesting sites we went to have dinner at an Indian restaurant. They didn’t allow us to enter from the front but only through a shady back alley and seated us in an area that was separate from the main restaurant. They were super friendly and the food was delicious.