Stirling/home:
Author: Ruby Gilmour, highly commended entry for the George Buchanan Creative Writing Prize 2024
For such a small city, Stirling sure has a packed history.
How to describe this place I call home? Nine hundred whole years of human history in this place has something of a head start over nanoscopic, trifling me. But then again, that’s small fry. Abbey Craig, with its shock of craggy, mottled grey, sloping escarpment, erupted from the earth some 350 million years ago: the perfect site on which to build a monument to that young man William Wallace. Nestled in between the Ochil Hills and Ben Lomond and the Trossachs, the vast, flattened carse land of the Forth Valley lies like an opened history book. Each narrow wynd, crooked cobble stone, and rain speckled sandstone brick of the city is a musty page. Stirling Castle, the majestic heart, looms over the city, wise and avuncular keeping watch like old Father Time himself; the River Forth swirls and bends across the fields like a basilic vein. The weather’s dreich? It’s no matter. All the better for offsetting the jewel box of colours of a fresh Stirling spring. The distant lapis lazuli blue drenched hills, the patchwork of verdant greens of the beechwoods, alders and oaks, and the electric pink azaleas like a paint palette in JD Fergusson’s studio. Like Stirling’s own son Don Roberto, I gaze in awe of the landscape, wondering where the town ends and the country begins[1]. Where else could you stand outside Cash Converters and see the noble rocky hill face of Dumyat?
Whispers of the past flicker through suddenly like a rogue frame in a phenakistoscope, merging modern mundanity with medieval history. When I’m doing my own battle over Stirling bridge, heavy laden Tesco bags in tow, the clink of tin cans like English armour. Driving through the eerie, now silent fields of Sheriffmuir at night with pals, talking crap, so indulgent in our boredom. On a pub crawl, silly with laughter, feeling like that old saying ‘[s]he who holds Stirling holds Scotland’. Afterwards waiting for chips and curry, ravenous like the old Stirling wolf who lay in wait for the Vikings. In the morning, grey, pallid and eternally damned like the ghostly Green Lady who haunts the castle.
The handsome sweeps of shops, brightly tiled tenement closes, and the tree lined avenues of villas around King’s Park bequeathed by more elegant former times. The dignified beauty of the former mining Hillfoots Villages in the shadow of the gorse scattered Ochil’s, a reminder of harder times.
Everywhere, time, like the cars whizzing round and round the Bayne clock, all day and all night. So much time concentrated in so small a place, like a Stirling pint which holds three equivalent imperial pints. Try as you might to grasp the city, we’re all just transient travellers, ephemeral blips passing through timeless Stirling.
[1] Father Archangel of Scotland and other essays, by G. & R. B. Cunninghame Graham https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x030832859&view=1up&seq=17
