The terrain around Stirling at the Battle of Bannockburn 1314: combined scientific and documentary approaches to reconstruction. II. The ‘High Road’

ABSTRACT In this second part, we analyse from new radiocarbon (14C) dating of landforms, palaeo-environmental analyses of sediment stratigraphies and documentary evidence for land use, the ‘high road’ to Stirling, across high ground west of the coastal plain, in the early 14th century. We identify a number of significant mis-perceptions of the landscape in the literature, and again stress the need for linked multi-proxy data sources. We re-think the obstacles imagined by some workers to have faced the advancing English to Stirling and show that few were obstacles, particularly in comparison to a path across the coastal plain. We show that the distribution of peat in basins and deep river valleys will have presented problems, however, and this may have been influential.