Our first stop at Scotland on our British Isles cruise aboard Regal Princess – our first stop at Scotland on any cruise – was at the port of Greenock along the River Clyde, and as close as most ships will get to Glasgow if that’s where you intend to spend a day ashore. We, however, weren’t planning to visit Glasgow, nor were we planning to look around Greenock itself, and this despite never having visited either place before. Our history of trips together involving Scotland to this point had been a single short break to the Dumfries and Galloway area in 2010. Glasgow did appeal as it’s a large city with some great architecture by all accounts but we had somewhere else we fancied visiting first.
That somewhere else we fancied visiting was not actually Stirling but that’s where we started the day’s Princess Cruises excursion after a nice drive through some of the Scottish countryside.
Our bus stopped at the bottom of a hill where those of us aboard were given an amount of time to spend in the city. One option was to stick to the flat ground and head into the city for, most probably knowing most cruisers, a coffee. The other option was to head up the not-too-steep-but-steep-enough hill to Stirling Castle. That, as you’ve doubtlessly guessed, is what we opted to do. This visit wasn’t included as part of the tour so you’d need to factor in the time to reach the castle, time there, and cost of entry to see whether it’s worth it, but for us it was a chance to visit a castle and we do like to visit castles while we are absolutely indifferent to visiting coffee shops.
We were dropped off close to the Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman statue. Not only was Campbell-Bannerman a prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1905 to 1908 but he was also technically the first prime minister, the title not existing prior to his tenure. He also shares a birthday with me. Not the year, of course, because scientists would likely be checking out my extreme longevity if that were the case.
The walk was just strenuous enough for us to have a few pauses – we’re not the most mobile of people but we keep persisting just to punish our bodies – and there were some interesting buildings on display along the street’s ascent that made photo breaks a useful excuse. We particularly liked the Stirling Boys Club, built in 1929 and sporting the interesting mottos on its exterior wall of “Keep Smiling”, “Play The Game”, and “Quarrelling Is Taboo”.
We reached the top, paid to enter Stirling Castle, and set about wandering around with the limited time available. One of the first sights we saw from this high vantage point over the city was the distant Wallace Monument, something that had been pointed out on our drive here earlier in the day so we knew what we were looking at. Built in the middle of the nineteenth century and standing nearly seventy metres in height the monument commemorates the life of William Wallace and is probably therefore incredibly disappointing to anyone who’s seen Braveheart and thinks it’s in any way accurate. The clue was that Mel Gibson was involved. Come on.
Stirling Castle acted as both an important strategic defence point and a palace for royalty in Scotland with several kings and queens crowned there, including Mary, Queen of Scots in 1542. Whenever a war or uprising occurred it typically came under siege because of its important location as a downstream crossing over the River Forth.
It was good to see lots of other cruise passengers visiting Stirling Castle, particularly a large contingent of the Red Hat Society who were on the ship with us. They weren’t there as part of our tour and our tour was the only one organised by Princess that hit Stirling so this must have been something they arranged independently.
We largely wandered the battlements and ducked into most of the exterior buildings and, sadly, failed to realise in our time there that we could venture into some of the more impressive rooms. Subsequently, while we enjoyed that we’d visited Stirling Castle we left with a general feeling that it was good, but not great as far as castles go. That’s our fault, so if we’re in the area again we’ll have to make sure to rectify that mistake.
Had we realised that there were rooms to visit then we’d have stayed longer at Stirling Castle but we wrongly decided that we’d seen everything there was to really see – the Great Hall and the views over the Scottish landscape had been very nice – so left to make our way back down the hill and to a pub near to where the bus would be picking us up from (no, not the Wetherspoon’s; never a Wetherspoon’s). We knew we wouldn’t get a great local drink there but we still managed to get something Scottish.
In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll head to the Falkirk Wheel to take a ride on it, and that was the thing we’d really wanted to do on this excursion.