The huge and beautiful hand-woven Stirling tapestries are in their new palace home at last – and they look a million dollars.

In fact they are worth more than that.

Four of an eventual seven are complete, with a fifth soon to join them, and they represent a decade of work by a skilled international team of weavers based at Stirling Castle and at the West Dean Tapestry Studio in West Sussex.

Each work of art is more than 3m tall and they will be among the many spectacular sights which visitors can enjoy at our special opening weekend for the castle’s Renaissance royal palace on 4 & 5 June.

They grace the walls of the Queen’s Inner Hall where Mary of Guise, widow of James V, once welcomed visitors into her royal presence.

The tapestries are new versions of fine surviving series which tell the tale of The Hunt of the Unicorn and which are now in New York.

The Stirling Tapestries Project, which involved an investment of around £2 million and is largely funded by philanthropists, is based on these because it is known that the Scottish royal family had a set a series depicting ‘the historie of the unicorne’ at about this time.

Scottish royal palaces would have been richly decorated with such works, which were loved for their artistic value and were also great draft excluders. They were also a superb way to display wealth as commissioning good quality work would cost about the same as having a warship built.

Most of the historic examples we see these days have become faded by centuries of exposure to sunlight.

The glory of the Stirling set is that they are a chance to see them as originally intended – sharp, bright and hugely colourful.

To make sure you don’t miss our weekend of opening celebrations book now.

Matthew Shelley, Stirling Castle communications