*Doune* comes from the Scottish Gaelic *An Dun*, meaning the fort. The village sits in a tongue of land enclosed by the River Teith and the Ardoch Burn, within the parish of Kilmadock. The fort that gave the place its name is partly Roman: the small primary school stands today on the site of a Roman fort excavated by Headland Archaeology, where the legionaries of the first century AD built bread ovens and watched the road north. But the area was inhabited long before Rome. When Doune's old golf course was quarried in the 20th century, the sand was used to build the Longannet power station. Quarrying destroyed a 150-yard-long mound known locally as the Round Wood. Inside it the workmen found a stone cist containing the bones of a small boy aged about six, buried with a small stone axe. He was one of the Beaker People, an early Bronze Age child more than 3,500 years old, his grave goods telling us little except that someone had cared enough to bury him with a tool fit for a man.

Doune is dominated by its castle. Built in the late 14th century by Robert Stewart, Duke of Albany and Regent of Scotland, the stronghold is a fortress and a manor house at once, its great tower-house and kitchen tower linked by a hall that has survived almost intact. Bonnie Prince Charlie passed through Doune in 1745 on his way south, lodged briefly at the castle, and the building has since worked as a film set as productively as any in Britain. It is the *Monty Python and the Holy Grail* castle, the one where Sir Galahad is chased through Castle Anthrax and Arthur is insulted from the battlements. It is also Winterfell from the first season of *Game of Thrones*, Castle Leoch from *Outlander*, and a location in the 1952 *Ivanhoe* and the 2018 *Outlaw King*. The result is a small Perthshire village whose visitor numbers are wildly disproportionate to its population.

The folklore is strange and persistent. East of Doune, in a small wood above Doune Lodge called Ternishee, the old tales placed a meeting-ground of fairies. On the Fairy Knowe, a hillock on the right bank of the Ardoch, fairy dancing parties were recounted into living memory. A burial mound called Tullochanknowe, near the Bridge of Teith on the low road to Callander, was said to be a favourite haunt. Modern Doune has different obsessions. The Doune Speed Hillclimb is the most prestigious hillclimb motorsport course in Scotland and hosts a round of the British Hill Climb Championship every year, the cars screaming up a narrow tarmac strip in a private estate. Land east of the village belongs to the Stirling of Keir family. One member, David Stirling, founded the Special Air Service in 1941 and is commemorated by a monument on the Keir land known as the Hill o' Row.

The clan names that recur in Doune's parish records read like a roll-call of central Scotland: Campbell, Stewart, Ferguson, Morrison, McAlpine, McLaren, MacDonald, Mathieson, Cameron. In the 2001 census, 2.75 percent of residents could still speak Scottish Gaelic, a tiny but stubborn percentage in a village that used to be a Gaelic-speaking stronghold. Today's small primary school teaches Gaelic from Primary 1 to 7, and Spanish from Primary 5 upwards, the village hedging its bets between ancestry and globalisation. The railway that once linked Doune to Dunblane is gone. The pistol manufactory is gone. The fairies are notional. What survives is the castle on the bend of the Teith, the rumble of racing engines in spring, and the slow, durable life of a Perthshire burgh that long ago decided to take its own legends seriously.