We visited Bannockburn recently, a place we had never been before, it’s not far from Stirling. The famous battle was fought there in 1314 although there’s no actual archeological evidence of the battle now, the geography of the battle was known as it was the bogginess of the terrain and Bruce’s knowledge of it which led to the Scottish victory. There’s now a visitor centre there, but the statue in the photo below of Robert the Bruce by Pilkington Jackson was placed there in 1964. I have to say that modern day sculptors seem to have lost the art of sculpting, this one is really good.
There’s also a rotunda below, with a massive flagpole which dates from Victorian times although the rotunda is much more modern.
Inside the actual visitor centre we enjoyed a really informative talk by Callum, who certainly knows his subject. He used cards to explain where each army was and pushed them around as they moved around the battlefield. There were also animated films which Jack thought were a bit amateurish looking, but I really liked them, there were two dimensional figures which had a feeling of puppets the way they moved, I thought it was quite artistic.
The articles on display are all reproductions as there are no archaeological finds in the area at all. As the soldiers in the Scottish army weren’t actually paid they were given permission to pick over the battlefield and take anything away that they wanted, it would have been picked clean, anything which had been missed would have sunk into the bog over the centuries.
This is the view down to the area where the battle took place.
If you happen to be interested in the battle there’s a good You Tube animation of it below. The narrator is somewhat strange, there are some mistakes in pronunciation of basic words such as Scone which should not be pronounced like the baked scone, but should rhyme with ‘boon’ and incursion doesn’t have two ‘s’ sounds, plus the spelling is all American, but I suppose that’s me nit-picking.
Your photo of the battlefield model, and description of the knowledgeable guide, reminded me of Sir Brian Horrocks and his TV series analyzing famous battles. No computer graphics, no re-enactments, just a brilliant speaker talking passionately about his favourite subject using only a simple model and a pointer. His enthusiasm was infectious.
I tried watching the YouTube video you referenced, but had to give up after a few minutes. There was something very unnatural about the narrator’s voice. Too much tension with little variation. For a moment I thought that it was computer-generated.
When I encounter videos and documentaries like that, I usually give up, go over to Wikipedia, and pick up several times more information in a fraction of the time.
Janusz,
I listened right to the end of it and came to the conclusion that it was a computer generated voice. It’s really strange, and the text had American spellings. Yes Wiki can be good but not for everything. I believe that anybody is at liberty to add and delete from the articles. There was an author (can’t remember who) who routinely corrected his own Wiki article but within ten minutes it was ‘corrected’ by someone, so he gave up doing it.
If you create a Wikipedia account you can edit almost anything, but you’re expected to justify the changes, and it’s possible that one of the admins will override them.
Whenever I come across errors or mistakes, I usually correct them. On the other hand I no longer contribute. There’s always someone, somewhere who knows more about the subject than I do.