C What did William Wallace really look like?

C Having said that, while a group of local historians decry the 19th century sculpture in its niche in the Town Steeple as “second rate”, they claim it is STILL more accurate than Mr Gibson’s hairy, blue-faced Celtic warrior.

As part of a Wallace’s Lanark project being undertaken by those involved in the former Lanark Heritage Group, now merged into the Town Group, it has been concluded that both the kilted, beared Wallace in stone at the Cross and the film image were pure figments of the imagination, fuelled by a romantic image of Scotland.

Both were, in fact, Wallace as seen through tartan-tinted spectacles.

Risking an outcry, they claim that, had you lived back in Lanark in the 1290s and actually MET the great Scottish hero, you’d hardly be able to tell him apart from the ENGLISH knights he so famously did battle with.