Modern Use
The castle esplanade, or parade ground, has been used as an open-air concert venue for several noted acts, some of whom have used Stirling Castle and the surrounding scenery to film "in concert" DVDs. These acts include R.E.M., Ocean Colour Scene, Bob Dylan, Wet Wet Wet, and Runrig. The esplanade also hosts the city's Hogmanay celebrations. The Regimental Museum and Home Headquarters of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders are located in the King's Old Building.
The castle is open to the public year round. Stirling Castle is a popular place for tourists, and according to figures released by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, nearly 380,000 people visited in 2010.
An illustration of Stirling Castle features on the reverse side of a current series of £20 notes issued by the Clydesdale Bank, with Robert the Bruce on horseback in the foreground.
Due to its similar appearance to Colditz Castle in Saxony, Germany, the castle was used to film the exterior shots for the 1970s TV series Colditz, a drama about the many attempts of Allied POWs to escape from the castle during its use as a military prison in the Second World War.
A major international strongman contest entitled Pure Strength was held in the grounds of Stirling Castle in 1989.
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Famous quotes containing the word modern:
“Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)