Shot of the Day - # 45 - Stirling Bridge, Scotland

Stirling Bridge, Scotland (8 October 1989)

While I’m still questing and touring and shooting in the digital present, I want to occasionally bring forward favored images from back in the film days. I was going to name this post ‘Scotland…Just Passing Through’ as an indication of a certain lack of planning and foresight when it came to picture-taking.

Thirty-four years ago, we did our first trip to Europe. We were driving a big loop out and back from London. The route took us north to Scotland and on this day, we were driving west from Edinburgh toward Glasgow. Just two couples in a car, feeling our way across the countryside. No GPS. No internet to suggest attractions worth seeing. Unfortunate to realize where we were so many years later.

We did know enough to visit Stirling Castle but were there hours before it opened to the public. The castle is an impressive fortress and vital landmark of Scottish history. During the Wars of Independence, when Scots fought the English and each other, control of the castle changed hands eight times in fifty years.

We noodled around the grounds for a while and I paused by the River Forth. There was an old bridge with some hills and a tower in the distance. I like the shot for its composition and the uniform light on this overcast day.

Six years later, when the hit movie ‘Braveheart’ was released, I still didn’t connect it to where we were.

At the time I took the picture, I thought the view that included the monument on the upper right lent a nice element to the composition. Not wanting to wait until the castle was open to the public, we drove off. What did we know? Under the heading, ‘Better Late Than Never,’ I was able to use “The Google” decades later and learn about this critical time in Scotland’s history, a national hero and the monument I happened to include in the image.

The Battle of Stirling Bridge was one of many accomplishments of Scotland’s national hero William Wallace (Mel Gibson to most of you). On 11 September 1297, Wallace defeated the English just upstream from this point. The current bridge dates to the fifteenth century. The National Wallace Monument on the distant hill was opened to the public in 1869, 572 years after the battle.