Stirlingshire occupies the strategic waist of central Scotland where the Highlands meet the Lowlands, its county town of Stirling built around a castle guarding the ancient pass between the two. An eighteenth-century account of the town traced its prosperity to this very position: its trade between Highland and Lowland Scotland, its share in navigation on the Forth, and a garrison whose barracks had recently been enlarged, though the burgh's fortunes had been visibly shaken by the Jacobite risings of both 1715 and 1745. From the castle rock, the view down the winding Forth across the fertile carse land was already celebrated as one of the finest prospects in Scotland, framed by the distant Grampians, the Ochil Hills and the green slopes of the Campsie Fells.
Near the Carron, the curious circular Roman structure known as Arthur's O'on, some twenty-four feet across and open at the top, stood as one of the county's most puzzling antiquities before its eventual destruction, while the surrounding countryside bore traces of battles fought between Romans and ancient Caledonians, and of coins and shot still being turned up from more recent conflicts on the field near Falkirk. Stirling's own church, an unusual double-aisled Gothic building, stood beside Mar's Wark and the town lodging of the Earls of Argyll, both dating from the era when the castle still served as a royal residence.
Stirlingshire's native talent included George Buchanan, the great humanist scholar and tutor to James VI, born at Killearn and honoured there with a monument, and the historian Dr Robert Henry, who spent his final years in the county and left his library to found a public collection for the people of Linlithgow. Between Stirling and Glasgow, the county's western reaches were adorned with fine estates including Buchanan House, seat of the Duke of Montrose, giving this compact but historically pivotal shire a wealth of both scenery and scholarship.