Bruce may, or may not have been present, at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297. To this day die hard supporters of the doomed Wallace blame Bruce for a catalogue of misfortune that befell the Laird of Elderly in the aftermath of hid triumph at Stirling. The Director of Braveheart exploited this distorted view of Bruce in the film to maximum effect. The film damned Bruce forever in the eyes of those same diehards. It also had to be said that Braveheart opened the eyes of tens of thousands of Scots to a better understanding of their own History. Who cold forget that memorable moment in the film when Wallace addressed his troops and that his fiery speech on the battle field at Falkirk, the camera zoomed in for a close up as he was talking. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing at the end of the first century AD tells us that, ‘The Picti of Caledonia went into battle naked, their faces smeared with (woad) blue paint’. No historian was at hand when that scene was shot on location!