It’s a skip and a jump these days to get from Stirling to Krakow, in Poland. Down the motorway to Edinburgh Airport, board a plane and you can be there in time for an afternoon tour of the Wawel Palace. I’ve just made the trip myself and it couldn’t have been easier – very different from the 1530s. Back then the 1,066 mile journey involved sailing tempestuous oceans in small wooden ships before traipsing rudimentary roads on foot or horseback. Despite all this there were projects taking place at about the same time in Stirling and Krakow which had remarkable similarities. It seems that both Sigismund I of Poland and James V of Scotland came up with the idea of decorating the throne room ceilings of their palaces with large numbers of carved wooden heads. In each case it was as part of their marriage celebrations – the one to Bona Sforza of Naples and the other to Mary de Guise.

As manager of the project to return the Stirling palace to how it may have looked when it was new I very much wanted to see Wawel, and particularly the ceiling. It is the nearest surviving equivalent to what we will have when a replica set of the Stirling Heads are fixed to the ceiling of the King’s Inner Hall in a few months’ time. There are big differences between the two, as the Polish ones are three-dimensional rather than being in great carved oak medallions, but the basic concepts had much in common – when you entered the presence of the king there would be dozens of painted wooden faces staring down at you. Wawel was very impressive. And it was exciting to look round a successful visitor attraction with similarities to what we are aiming for in Stirling.

While there is no direct evidence that the Wawel ceiling was a direct inspiration for the one at Stirling, there were a fair number of Scottish merchants in Poland at the time. Even more tantalizing is the fact that the oak for the Stirling Heads was actually from Poland. So standing there, staring up at the Polish heads, I was wondering if those little sailing ships that plied the oceans between the kingdoms transported more than just timber – perhaps there was also a cargo of innovative ideas about contemporary art.

Peter Buchanan, Stirling Castle Palace Project Manager.