Stirling Castle

This Saturday most of our group took a trip to Stirling Castle. It took about 2 hours to get there by bus, which was slightly nauseating, but not too bad. The bus dropped us off at the bus station in the town of Stirling, which is at the bottom of a very large hill. In order to get to the castle, we had to climb quite a large hill (all of cobblestone, of course).

I thought that the grounds of Stirling Castle were a lot more impressive than the castle itself. Our trip to Stirling was right after we had seen Linlithgow, which you are allowed to climb all over, and that was not the case at Stirling. There was a large modern, white building in the center of the castle that seemed very out of place. But the courtyards were amazing. Because the castle is on a hill, you can see for miles into the distance. From one end of the castle we were able to see snow-covered mountains. From the other end we got a nice view of the Wallace Monument. I hope to have the pictures up soon. A lot of the pictures were taken from within the courtyard in the castle. I was able to walk along a stone path that was about ten feet off the ground and look over the wall to see the surrounding area. While I was doing this, a bunch of other kids from our group were climbing around the hills below me. So of course we shouted to each other to try and take pictures. That helps explain some of the pictures of them standing on the hill...

After Stirling castle, Lauren, Brandon and I took a cab across town and up another large hill to the Wallace Monument. We did some more climbing until we got to the base of the monument. It is a huge stone structure that has 256 internal steps (on a really small spiral staircase) to get to the top. Yep, we climbed them all. We got a 360-panoramic view from the top and could actually see Edinburgh. It was very, very pretty. After climbing the monument we quickly rushed to the train station to take a train to Inverness so we could spend the rest of the weekend at Loch Ness. I think I'll save a separate post for the adventures at Loch Ness!