Postcard: Stirling

The Braveheart effect has served this small city 60 km northwest of Edinburgh well. In a mid-19th century swell of patriotism, public donations helped construct a monument in honor of William Wallace, Scotland's fiercest defender. The 67-m Gothic tower stands atop the summit of Abbey Craig, where Wallace is said to have watched the English armies gathering before he chopped his way to victory at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297. But the American high school students here on a spring afternoon 710 years later are more interested in the 4-m-tall sandstone statue in the monument's parking lot. It depicts Mel Gibson as Wallace in the 1995 movie Braveheart, his face contorted in mid-battle cry.

If only the locals were as impressed. "Someone knocked his nose off just recently," says an assistant in the gift shop. In fact, the statue has been repeatedly vandalized. Many Scots cringe at the tribute to Gibson's movie, but the number of visitors to the monument almost doubled the year after the film was released, and the Scottish National Party (SNP) smelled a political opportunity: it handed out leaflets featuring Gibson's image to exiting moviegoers, hoping to fuel its campaign for Scotland to secede from the United Kingdom.

Just over a decade later, the SNP is set to become the largest party in the Scottish Parliament. In polls leading up to the May 3 election, it's about six percentage points ahead of the Labour Party, which has not lost an election in Scotland for 50 years. That's not enough to form a majority government, but it's a powerful position from which to enter coalition talks, possibly with the Liberal Democrats.

So is the spirit of Wallace rousing Scots once more to demand freedom? Not really. In the town of Stirling itself, there are few mentions of Braveheart outside the Thistles Shopping Centre — just yellow balloons tied to a trestle table laid out with leaflets and buttons bearing the SNP logo. In recent years the party has softened its stance, moving away from the notion that winning a majority vote would give it a mandate to negotiate independence. The party now proposes a referendum first.

Bruce Crawford, the SNP's local candidate, brandishes no broadsword, greeting shoppers with more mundane vows to revoke an unpopular local services tax. This election is "not actually about independence," says Peter Lynch, professor of politics at Stirling University. "People want more from their Parliament, but they don't necessarily want that yet, if they ever do."

Crawford argues that voters are increasingly looking to Europe. He points to a trio of well-to-do neighbors. "There are three countries around Scotland's shores: Ireland, Iceland and Norway — all small countries, all in the top six wealthiest nations on earth in terms of gdp per head," he says. "Small nations like Malta and Slovenia sit at the top table in the E.U., and Scotland is in the side room while the U.K. government negotiates for us."

The E.U. might hold some allure, but the old union still means something to many Scots. An April poll found that 67% would prefer the status quo or more powers to the Scottish Parliament, with only 22% backing independence. An earlier poll, on the other hand, showed 52% of the Scottish public supporting independence — and an even higher percentage of English in favor of Scots separation.

That ambivalence will be reflected on May 1, the tricentenary of the Act of Union, which united the Parliaments of Scotland and England. The anniversary will pass barely marked in either country. And tensions between the two may even increase if Gordon Brown, a Scot, becomes the U.K.'s Prime Minister as expected in June. It will highlight an anomaly that's existed since 1999, when Scotland created its own Parliament to address local issues: Scottish M.P.s still vote on English matters in Westminster, but English M.P.s have no say in Edinburgh. "I'd be upset by that too," says Crawford. "The way to solve that is to give England independence."