The Borestone

This rare watercolour was purchased recently for the Stirling Smith collections. The artist, William Greenlees, captioned and dated it carefully:

STIRLING CASTLE from the feild (sic) of Bannockburn
The stone on which BRUCE’S standard was placed.
May 10 1842.

Greenless was a well – known Edinburgh based artist, who exhibited regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy in the period 1847-1850. As a visit from Queen Victoria was planned in 1842, this work may have been done for a Stirling guide book. Two of his works are in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery collection.

This view of the Borestone shows why the Oddfellows erected the flag pole beside it in 1870. Situated in the middle of a field, it was difficult to find.

The Borestone was sought out by visitors to Stirling for generations, and so many souvenirs were taken that the land owner created the protective metal grille in 1836. Two Argylls and four others are shown inspecting it. In 1957, the Borestone was eliminated by the cairn built by Stirling Guildry, an act described in Lesley Duncan’s Stirling poem, Careless with Stones.

 

 

Bannockburn, June 1964

In 1964, Stirling was preparing to celebrate the 650th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, which secured Scotland’s independence, 23-24 June 1314. The event of the day was the unveiling of the statue of King Robert the Bruce and the inauguration of the rotunda and heritage centre by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. The statue was designed by Charles d’Orville Pilkington-Jackson, Scotland’s foremost sculptor.
The photograph was taken by the late Mr. Robin Common, dentist and partner in Platt and Common, prior to the formal event of 24 June 1964.

Stirling has always celebrated this great national victory in special ways. 150 years ago on 24 June 1861, the foundation stone for the National Wallace Monument was laid on Abbey Craig, and the crowds which came to Stirling on that day have not been exceeded. Some of the excitement will be captured at the Wallace Monument this Friday, with the issue of special medals to visitors.

Times Review of our Bannockburn exhibition

The Times Travel Section (7 June 2014) gave us a surprise part in their review of Stirling /Bannockburn.

Theodore Napier (1845 – 1924)

One of the people who kept the annual celebration of the Battle of Bannockburn alive in the period 1893 – 1914 was the Australian businessman and Scottish patriot, Theodore Napier, seen in this photograph at the Borestone in his Jacobite dress, in the style of 1714 (great belted kilt and eagle – feathered blue bonnet). The outfit always guaranteed press coverage, and many hundreds of people, members of the Scottish Patriotic Association and the Scottish Home Rule Association assembled at Bannockburn every year under Napier’s guidance.

Napier was treasurer of the Scottish National Association of Victoria, and his first pamphlet, Scotland’s Demand for Home Rule, was published in Melbourne, 1892. In Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Year, he organised a monster petition to the Queen requesting that her government should stop using the terms English and England instead of British and Britain. Napier also organised the fund raising for the Wallace Monument at Elderslie, and the commemoration for the 600th anniversary of the death of Wallace in 1905.

In many respects, he was like the late David Ross (1958 – 2010) who walked in Wallace’s footsteps from Robroyston to London in 2005, and organised the funeral for the 700th anniversary of Wallace’s death in St. Bartholomew’s Church, Smithfield.

Robert the Bruce

The great iconic statue of Bruce at Bannockburn was unveiled by Her Majesty the Queen in 1964. The occasion was the 650th anniversary of the Battle which took place on 24 June 1314. It was the sculptor’s master work, and made possible only because of major sponsorship from Calgary in Canada, where there is another copy of the statue.
Pilkington Jackson studied the facial reconstruction techniques current in the USSR in the early 1960s before starting the work. He modelled the face of Bruce directly from a cast of the king’s skull, and face of this statue is the one which is recognised as that of King Robert the Bruce, who died in 1328, today.
However, the statue is also a great equestrian work, and is a focal point for the thousands of visitors who go to the field of Bannockburn every year. It is one of the best-known and most-photographed statues in Scotland. Freelance Press photographer and Stirling resident A. D. S. MacPherson (1913 – 2009) has captured the statue from an angle which is rarely photographed. The horse and rider appear to be in motion, and the movement with which the sculptor endowed the work is the dominant feature.
The photograph is a tribute which the sculptor himself would have appreciated.

James Wedlake : Bannockburn

As Featured on ArtsinScotlandTV our Intern gives a short insight into our Bannockburn Exhibition