Murray Cook column: volunteers unearth stories of 16th century barrier protecting Stirling

The weekend digging took place at the Old Town Cemetery
-Credit: (Image: Murray Cook)


The weekend saw a team of us back in the Old Town Cemetery looking at the lost bastion we found earlier in the year.

We found the very base of the floor of the bastion, built in the 1540s to stop an English army forcing the infant Mary Queen of Scots into marriage.

The wall is one of Scotland’s treasures and it had never been properly recorded until we began to look at it.

This bastion, carved into bedrock, protected a gate that was redesigned in the 1630s when Cowane’s Hospital was built.

Part of this redesign involved expanding the cemetery and importing nearly two metres worth of soil.

But the wall here is very thin, a third of the size of the older sections. It transpired that it’s a repair done around 1800.

How can we be so precise I hear you cry?

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Well at the bottom was 19th century pottery but above it were the remains of the bothy built to deter grave robbers in the 1820s….a very small window for the wall to be built.

Now this means that we think there is an older version of the gate and perhaps the wall buried in the corner of the cemetery which gives us a target for next year!

All weekend (except in the hale) we spoke to a stream of international and local visitors fascinated by what we were doing, keen to learn about Stirling’s amazing past. We left the footings of the bastion exposed so the next time you go up you can have a look!