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And when Edward was given the broken Scottish royal seal, he set it aside, commenting.

A man does good business when he rids himself of a turd.

One by one, a host of Scots came to do homage to Edward, including the Bruces,

but there was one who did not Malcolm Wallace.

And this Malcolm had a brother.

Here he is, the standard-issue freedom fighter of the imagination -

the "give 'em hell" whiskers, the "save me, Jesus" eyes, the hamstrings from hell.

We've not a clue, of course, whether William Wallace looked remotely like this

any more than we know whether he could have stood in as a stuntman for Mel Gibson, who immortalised him in "Braveheart".

But Wallace is one of those larger-than-life figures whose epic romance refuses to go away.

It just grows, to match this extraordinary monument to him dominating the Stirling skyline.