The problem for Bruce was to keep the English out of Stirling till St John's day had passed. In good time he had selected and laid out the inevitable field of battle with military prescience of the first order. He had mustered his forces in the Torwood, in a position commanding the approach to Stirling from the south; and on the morning of Saturday, the 22nd of June, on news of the approach of the English, he marched them to the chosen spot on a plain some two miles south of Stirling within the last large loop of the Bannock Burn, called the New Park--a hunting-ground of the Scots kings. The Park was a piece of firm ground rising on the north and west into the swelling ridges of Coxet Hill near St Ninian's, and Gillies Hill on the left of the Bannock above the bend towards the Forth. Eastwards it fell away into a marshy tract filling the angle of the two rivers and intersected by watercourses. Southwards, too, the hard ground was broken by two morasses--Halbert's Bog and Milton Bog--between the Park and the Bannock. Bruce rested his right wing on the steep bank of the Bannock below Gillies Hill; his left wing stretched away past St Ninian's nearly to the gates of Stirling; his rear was protected by Gillies Hill and the Bannock behind. The English would be compelled to advance either across the Bannock between Parkmill and Beaton's Mill--a breadth of a short mile, free from precipitous banks--to the line of hard ground, with a contracted front, to be immediately divided by the intervening bogs; or else along the line of low and marshy flat between the Park and the Forth. To reduce the superiority of the English cavalry, Bruce had industriously dug pits along the parts of the firm route by which they would probably, if not inevitably advance--pits a foot wide, round, and deep as a man's knee, honeycombing the ground; and these holes he covered loosely with a disguise of brushwood, turf, and grass. He is also said to have inserted in them stakes shod with iron points. Sir Thomas de la Moore mentions long transverse trenches, similarly covered so as to bear men aware of them, but not horses. Later writers add that Bruce strewed the ground with calthrops, or metal spikes, to cripple the English horses. He himself had determined to fight on foot.