Murray Cook on the cannons of Stirling
Many of you will know that Stirling has six cannons spread through the city.
There are two on Mote Hill, two at the bottom of Broad Street and two at Cowane’s Hospital.
The paintwork on all of them has over the years been worn away by the thousands of children who have clambered over them.
These weapons of war were not attempts to control an unruly population but celebrations of Stirling’s military connections.
While the Mote Hill and Broad Street canons were `Army surplus’, the Cowane’s pair are military booty, captured from the Russian Empire during the siege of Sebastopol in 1855, the key event of the Crimean Campaign.
This war was made famous by Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, which describes the valour of British light cavalry as they rode to certain death following poor decisions by commanding officers.
As the poem famously states: `... Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.’
Both cannons feature the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs, the Czars of the Russian Empire.
The symbol is ancient and goes back to the Byzantium Empire (the eastern Roman Empire) which only finally fell in the middle of the 15 th century.
It is sometimes said that the cannons were made by the Carron Ironworks in Falkirk and sold to the Russians.
While they were landed at Grangemouth, they were certainly made in Russia. However, this legend has some truth in it as the company supplied weapons to the early United States of America and these were used against British troops in the 1812 war, when we famously set fire to the White House.
And the son-in-law of one of the founders of the ironworks, Charles Gascoinge, who also managed the factory, added to the tale of Carron cannon being used against British troops. He left in 1786, before the company’s success became obvious, to re-organise – at the invitation of the Csarina, Catherine the Great – the production of iron and cannon in Russia, taking trade secrets with him.
He did not return but then again he would not have been welcome had he done so.