fredxmertz | Reading

Stirling is on the River Forth.

This is the old bridge (no, not the one the battle of Stirling Bridge was fought on, which was there before this later medieval one)

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cmcmck

This house, close to the castle and next to the Holy Rude (as you'd expect from The Earl of Mar, a senior noble) was destroyed during the civil wars.

And this was Cowane's house (he of the hospital). You can see the difference between a noble's house and a wealthy merchant's house.

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cmcmck

The great hall. Just look at that hammerbeam roof!

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cmcmck

The palace:

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cmcmck

WW1 memorial for the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders- the regiment of both his father and grandfather:

I was taken by this window detail:

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mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

cmcmck

The term 'hospital' or 'spital' in Scots was used to describe an alms house.

Cowane's alms house in Stirling in the oldest surviving charitable trust in Scotland and one of the oldest in the UK founded by the local merchant John Cowane. This is he on the ad.

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cmcmck

The Holy Rude (and yes, it is spelled that way) church is up at the top of the Back Walk we went down the previous day.

If Stirling had a cathedral, this would be it, but royalty liked to keep the bishops at arms length and the castle is a royal palace so the local cathedral is down the road in Dunblane.

A sign on a building once used by the tailors' guild.

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fiat_knox

I had a dream on this day, nineteen years ago. That particular dream just called to me, like divine revelation.

You don't want to know which god sent the dream. Let's just say She isn't the one Christians are supposed to worship.

Go and look up that dream. It's still weird, to this day.

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cmcmck

is on a wall close to the station:

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cmcmck

We went to visit the Smith gallery which we always do whenever we're in Stirling.

It is named for the local artist Thomas Stuart Smith (1813-1869 and has a collection of his art and lots of other interesting stuff.

As we walked along to the gallery I noticed this outside the bowling club (that's lawn bowls which is still big in the UK).

Shanks (Armitage Shanks) still exist as a company making lawn mowers and such.

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Primitive UFO's

Alien Werewolf

Reading

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Bridges!

Mar's Wark

Inside the castle

Stirling castle

Inside the Holy Rude.

Search maintenance

Cowane's Hospital.

A walk up the hill to the Holy Rude

Nineteen Years Since The Architect Dream

The Stirling mural

The Smith Gallery

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