Several mornings a week I commute into Edinburgh from my home outside Callander. On the road at 6am, it can be a bleary-eyed and thankless journey. But one of its compensations is the view of Stirling Castle. It’s the most remarkable barometer of the daily weather and the changing season.

This morning as I passed, the castle and its rock were a brooding black mass against an inky, starlit sky. But the lights from some of the rooms made me wonder how medieval travellers had felt – perhaps battling through wind and rain while kings, queens and courtiers were snug in their apartments. Recently a crescent moon, as thin and sharp as a silver paper knife, hung just above the Great Hall. But then sometimes the mist is so thick that there’s no castle at all.

While autumn is lovely, what I look forward to is spring. The distance from which I can first see the castle is a marker of the lengthening days. And best of all is when my journey brings me to the castle at sunrise. The entire fortress can be bathed in pinks and deeper rosy shades – magical, and hardly belonging to the routine realities of office chores and supermarket shopping. What I never do, and always kick myself later, is make sure I have a camera so I can capture moments like these for the future.

Matthew Shelley works with the Historic Scotland media and marketing department.

It's fascinating when you encounter things that take you right inside the minds of people from the past. With Halloween around the corner I was reminded of a good example of this at Stirling Castle. Cut into the palace outer doorway are the letters 'AMV', for Ave Maria Virginus, and on the door to James VI's closet there's a little Marigold. Both are easy to miss, but tell us a lot, as they are ritual markings to keep witches at bay. James spent much of his youth at Stirling and, as he grew up, he developed a deep fascination and fear of the occult. Later he was present at witchcraft trials that resulted in the gruesome deaths of the accused. In 1597 he published Daemonologie which claims that witches change into 'the likeness of a little beast or foule' and enter houses. It all goes to show how much times change. Today we see Guisers as a bit of fun, but to James the idea of witches was serious - deadly serious.

Richard Welander, Historic Scotland head of the collections unit