Generations of my mum’s family are from Stirling, and I was raised in the Top of the Town, about 100 metres from the castle. History was everywhere in streets that were dominated by Argyll’s Lodging, Mar’s Wark and other ancient buildings. Overshadowing all of them was the castle and its esplanade. From there you could stare out on the great medieval battlefields of Bannockburn and Stirling Bridge. In fact, I was William Wallace! When I was nine, Allan’s Primary School won a competition to perform a play on radio, and I was the man himself, describing his victory over English forces at Stirling Bridge in 1297.
 
Then there was another great clash, the 1986 World Cup. Me and my pals were about 13 and we would go to play football on the grassy area at the bottom of the castle esplanade. Craig Lennon, a castle steward, regularly came to chase us off but we were cheeky and said we needed altitude training for the World Cup out in Mexico. Later I started going inside the castle for visits and became ever-more fascinated by its history, and the stories told by Craig and his colleagues.
 
You can never be sure what it is that shapes your future, but it may have been all this that encouraged me to go to Glasgow University and study history. In 1999 I was back, first as a seasonal steward, then a permanent one, and now as senior steward. Craig is now the castle’s longest serving steward and he likes to remind me of my footballing days on the esplanade!
          
The castle stewards still show visitors around the castle, regaling them with tales from the past. Maybe among the thousands we see each year there are cheeky lads and lasses who’ll end up taking the baton from us.

Ross Blevins is the Senior Steward at Stirling Castle.

I’m lucky, my job still excites me even after eight and a half years! What a spectacular place to work. It beats a high rise office any day, even in the winter when my office window rattles from the high winds! But the biggest reward of the job comes from teaching. It always makes me smile seeing the faces of school pupils as they walk through the entrance to the castle.

The expression of “wow” all over their faces. One of the burning questions is normally about what ghosts we have in the castle. So I usually fit in a wee spooky story somewhere in the activity. By the end of a session, having explored the castle buildings and taken part in hands-on learning in the education room, they leave with their imaginations ablaze. As one pupil said “this is the best, best, best trip ever” while clutching the knight’s sword he bought in the castle shop.

Kirsten Wood, Stirling Castle education officer.

It’s November and I’m back from a brisk walk in watery sunshine round Stirling Castle. I have done the circuit of a mile uncountable times in the thirty years I’ve lived here, watching the gradual changes of the seasons. But there are bigger, slower changes, too.

I’m a historian have researched many aspects of Stirling Castle’s varying past. But, day by day, it’s the setting I go for. This is a walk through a landscape which, over the centuries, has changed as much as the castle itself and I’m sure we can’t understand the castle without considering the setting.

The King’s Park was not just about hunting but provided essential fodder for the horses and campsites for armies from medieval time to the twentieth century. I pass the area of the medieval tournaments (rough, bloody affairs) and then the ‘new‘ tiltyard created in 1506 as these entertainments became more formalised spectator sports.

From the late eighteenth century, as tourism became increasingly important, paths were created around the castle. These were gentle walks for genteel people – but they are the very paths from which I look up at the castle today and say ‘Wow!’. Wow! It’s why the castle was put up there in the first place and why the landscape was designed around it. The landscape provides the setting and the context. It’s an old trick, a medieval trick. But the trick still works in November 2009.

John G Harrison is a freelance historian and author who lives in Stirling.