Retail Outlet

Stirling Bagpipes combines manufacturing workshop and a retail outlet. We specialise in making high quality hand crafted Highland Bagpipes as well as Smallpipes and Borderpipes.

We offer Bespoke Bagpipes from our standard range but can also create Tailor Made Sets according to our customer's specifications. Our turner will replace parts and do refurbishments as well as provide valuations. In our store we have a wide collection of antique Bagpipes of famous makes available for purchase.

Global Recongition

Our Stirling workshop and retail outlet has received the attention of some of the best-know travel guides & bloggers, newspapers and magazines.

Here just a few:

“This small shop sells bagpipes of every type and at every price, including antiques by legendary craftspeople that are displayed in glass cases. In the room behind the shop, the owner lovingly turns the chanters and drones, but he will happily take time to talk you through the history of these instruments.”

Fodor's Travel Guidebook

Bestselling US Travel Guide

“Bagpipes are handmade and repaired in this combined shop and workshop, which also houses a collection of antique bagpipes and piping paraphernalia. The place is a focus for local pipers, and sells books and CDs of pipe music.”

Lonely Planet

Global Travel Guide

Rick Steves was a big fan of my shop and many tourists that come and visit do so because of his travel guide.

Rick Steve Scotland

Global Travel Guide

Stirling - A Historical Place

Stirling Bagpipes is located in Stirling's historic Broad Street, which is the first street on leaving Stirling castle. Until recent years, it was the market place of the city, dating back to the 13th century.

In 1296, Stirling was granted the right to have a Merchant Guild and hold a weekly market. An annual trade fair was held in September with people gathering from far and wide to do business, exchange news and enjoy themselves.

Royal Proclamations were read from the Mercat Cross in Broad Street. From the front door of what is now the Tolbooth Music Centre, 'criminals' were put in the stocks and executions took place. The last public execution was in 1843.

‘The Tollbooth', the central regions' music centre, specialising in folk, jazz and world music, is directly across the street.

Stirling, on account of its geographical position, has been the site of six major battles which changed Scottish history. As a garrison town in the 18th and 19th centuries, the pipes have great military as well as cultural importance for Stirling. Stirling Burgh employed a town piper throughout the 18th century. When the weaving of tartan was forbidden in the Scottish highlands after the Jacobite Rising of 1745 - 46, Bannockburn was the first place in the lowlands where it was permitted, and a major industry which clothed the Highland regiments serving across the world, developed there. So Stirling is the centre for both tartan and bagpipes, and it would be good to have a bagpipe museum for that reason.

In the 20th century, many of the Regiments who served in the two great World Wars were mustered, provisioned and sent out from Stirling. Each Scottish Regiments had its own musical tradition, and a good selection of the bagpipe music, written for Stirling's resident regiment, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, can be enjoyed in the Argylls Museum in Stirling Castle.