Stirling Castle

Kings Knot

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Beneath the castle and the Queen's Hole, an area for the ladies to sit out and enjoy the view, is the "King's Knot", which was a grand formal garden. Only the outline of the King's Knot and an adjoining parterre (an area of flower beds and pathways) remain. In the afternoon and evening the area would enjoy the sunshine.

here are two gardens within the castle, the southern one including a bowling green. Below the castle's west wall is the King's Knot, a 16th-century formal garden, now only visible as earthworks, but once including hedges and knot-patterned parterres.[32] The gardens were built on the site of a medieval jousting arena known as the Round Table, in imitation of the legendary court of King Arthur.[67]

The King's Knot, the great formal garden behind the south façade of the Palace, is thought to date to the time of Mary's grandson, Charles I, but her father, James V, employed a French gardener at Stirling in the 1530s and thus the establishment of a garden here may date to these years

The gardens of Stirling Castle were redesigned in 1627. It was at this time that the King's Knot was also constructed, as part of grand formal gardens, in the valley below the Castle. The Castle itself was refurbished a decade earlier.

The King's Knot is now just a grassed-over octagonal stepped mound, the pattern still clearly visible. The gardens once had a pleasure canal. Clear view of the King's Knot, and further as far as Ben Lomond, can be enjoyed from the battlements.