CONTENTS. Page II. Roman Causeway, or Military Road............. 22 VIII. First Battle of Falkirk, 1298................... 181 IX. Battle of Bannockburn, 1314............................................ HISTORY OF STIRLINGSHIRE. THE SHIRE of STIRLING, in consequence of its situation upon the isthmus between the friths of Forth and Clyde, and in the direct passage from the northern to the southern parts of the island, hath been the scene of many memorable transactions. There are few shires in Scotland where monuments of antiquity are so frequently to be met with; neither does it yield to any in point of modern improvements, especially those which tend to the advancement of commerce and manufactures.* An account of the most re *(THE learned Camden, who flourished about the union of the English and Scottish Crowns, says that "Stirlingshire is inferiour to none in Scotland for fertility of soil and resort of mobility." Britannia, Gough's edition, Vol. III. p. 355. Editor.) B markable transactions, which have happened in that shire, from the Roman invasion of Scotland, to the present times, may not prove an unacceptable entertainment to the curious, and may tend to preserve the memory of the more ancient, when, by the devastations of time, and the improvements of agriculture, those monuments of them, which yet remain, can be seen no more. SECT. I. THE FORTS OF AGRICOLA. A FEW of those simple structures which are generally considered as monuments of Druidical worship, are discernible in this shire. But a description of them would convey small entertainment, and still smaller instruction, as it could cast no new light upon that ancient and once extensive mode of heathen religion. MR GORDON, author of the Itinerarium Septentrionale, observed some ruins at Eas ter-Bankier, in the neighbourhood of Castlecary, and upon Cowden-hill near Bonnybridge, which he conjectured to have been the foundations of two ancient towns; but the traces of them are now become so faint, as not easily to be discerned, THE first monuments, concerning the antiquity and original design of which we can attain to any degree of certainty, are the ruins of the præsidia, or forts, built, about eighty years after the birth of Jesus Christ, by Julius Agricola, who was the first that led a Roman army into these northern parts. Tacitus, in his life of that General, informs us, that, in his fourth campaign, he erected forts upon the narrow isthmus between the friths of Glota and Bodotria, that is, Clyde and Forth, with an intention to secure his conquests upon the south, and to confine the natives of the country as within another island. These forts appear to have been erected in the same tract where Lollius Urbicus afterwards raised the wall, which now goes by the name of Graham's Dyke. No vestiges of such works are to be seen in any other part of that isthmus; and, that those fabrics |