Monday June 11th

This morning we woke up to.....rain!!  Well that wasn't forecast for us today OR yesterday!  Well, we left for the Wallace Monument shortly after 10am as this was when it opened.  We walked up to the monument from the Visitors Centre Car Park instead of getting the free shuttle bus, and the walk wasn't as bad as you'd think, given that it was on a hill!  By the time we got there the rain was just in the wind and it wasn't too bad.  We went up MANY steps, most of which were a spiral stair case, stopping off at a couple of intervals in between to investigate a room in which was an exhibit telling the story of William Wallace and the monument.  At the top the view was actually quite good, not too windy and the cloud was lifting.  It looked like the wind was blowing the rain over towards Glasgow, so we were hoping that it would slowly clear for us in the afternoon.  Coming back down the tower and down the same walk back to the car, my legs were slowly turning into jelly, after having recovered from the dizziness resulting from coming down the spiral staircase!  I found a “wee highland cow” in the gift shop which was so cute I had to buy it, before we went on to Stirling Castle where several Scottish Kings and Queens have been crowned, including Mary, Queen of Scots in 1543.  The first record of Stirling Castle dates from around 1110 when King Alexander I dedicated a chapel here, and there have been at least 8 sieges of the Castle including several during the Wars of Scottish Independence.

We first decided to have lunch before exploring the castle which we did until around 2:30pm when we joined a tour of Argyll's Lodging with our guide who occasionally went off on little tangents asking where people had come from and little anecdotes of his own to add.  He was a very good guide!  Argyll’s Lodging is a 17^th century town house built in the renaissance style, residence of the Earl of Stirling and later the Earls of Argyll, and is not far from Stirling Castle.

After all this, we went back to the car and instead of having a wander around Stirling centre, we decided to go back to our B&B and thought it would be a good idea to go wandering around later on when we got hungry, so we could have a look at some places to eat.

When we got back, we remembered that our host mentioned visiting a quilting workshop around the back of the property, so we went to investigate.  There were 4 ladies there who welcomed us in and showed us their quilting, and we even had a go on a machine which you can use for freestyle patterns or you can programme a pattern into it and let it run.  It felt like it could be easily addictive, although the equipment is rather large so for everybody reading this – don't worry, I'm not interested in taking up quilting as well as my other crafting!  The house is already full of beads and wool as it is.... :)

That evening we went into Stirling to investigate places to eat and found La Ciociora, a small family run Italian place, where the food was delicious!