Within the fort was a layer of occupation debris containing pottery, including the upper half of a decorated vessel with more cultural material recovered from within the ramparts.

According to John Barbour,[5] an early Scottish poet writing in 1375, these "sma’ folk" were called down by The Bruce from the Borestone where he had raised his standard, late on the second day of the battle at a crucial stage.

The sma' folk descended the slopes of a hill yelling, banging pots and pans, and waiving pieces of clothing in the air at which point the English troops thinking the newcomers were reinforcements, fled.

Modern historical analysis most commonly proposes Coxet Hill, adjacent to St Ninians, as the location of the events Barbour describes.

The cliff edges of the northwest side of Gillies Hill, known as Touchadam Craig, are the habitat of several dozen ancient Scots pines.

Additionally, many volunteers have worked on restoring the grounds of the ruined Polmaise Castle garden, tennis courts, curling ponds, installing benches, picnic tables and paths; as well as giving guided walks around the hill.

These formations were created by the movement of glaciers over the carse shaping the more resistant (usually volcanic) plugs into cliff-like crags ("craig" in Scots) with trailing wakes of softer material called "tails."

Gillies Hill is located in Central Scotland east of the city of Stirling and south of the town of Cambusbarron within the Bannock Burn and River Forth watersheds.

A crag and tail formation, the hill rises gradually from an altitude of approximately 79 meters at the Bannock Burn Bridge at Sauchie Craig on its southern end to drop off in a series of crags (cliffs) - some natural, some the result of quarrying - at its northwest end at an approximate altitude of 160 meters.

The underlying geology of Gillies Hill is a layer of quartz-dolerite approximately 100 meters thick of the Late Carboniferous tholeiitic Midland Valley Sill-complex (Stirling Sill).

The quartz-dolerite of the hill, highly resistance to erosion, is a ready source of "whin-stone" for road beds and sea walls; concrete aggregate and kerbstones.

Dominant species found on Gillies Hill include sycamore, birch, broom, common ash, beech, larch, bracken, spruce, oak and willow.

Plants such as wood sorrel, common dog violets, and English bluebells most likely existed on the hill at the time of Robert the Bruce, and perhaps as far back as Iron Age Scotland.

Areas of the hill which have been re-planted or coppiced (pruned to supply long thin sprouts) or harvested for timber, may still have relatively undisturbed underlying vegetation containing species which take years to become established residents of the forest.Gillies Hill is home to many fine specimens of both broadleaf and coniferous trees, but two in particular stand out: a Scots pine nicknamed "The Big Pine," which has a girth of over 5.5 meters which makes it the fifth largest pine of this species in Britain – and the largest south of Perthshire; and a coppiced rowan of immense lower girth.

Also worth visiting is a row of massive, hollow but living, Sycamores that line the old road to the former site of Murrayshall west of the quarry.

The Scots pines found along the western cliff (Touchadam Craig) of Gillies Hill are relicts of an ancient pinewood supported by presence of the fungal species Russula integra var.

Rhododendron ponticum which was planted on the hill in the 19th century as a decorative shrub has spread uncontrollably, sometimes to many times the height of a person, effectively blocking sunlight from reaching the woodland species that carpet the forest floor, and creating a dark sterile understory devoid of life.

Bracken, Pteridium aquilinum, has colonized several of the hill's open areas so thickly with its rhizomatous roots that few other species can compete for survival.

(In the north of Scotland wild boar have recently been re-introduced in controlled environments and are successfully rooting out the bracken allowing a new generation of woodland to become established.)

The Murray family who built Polmaise Castle in 1865, created landscaped gardens incorporating many of the exotic coniferous trees that still grace the woodland.

These five Redwoods were planted in the 1860s by the Murray family along the walk from the castle to the large natural loch that was once on the upper portion of Gillies Hill, but was lost to quarrying.

If left undisturbed, these giants could well live over 3000 years and attain a mass of over 1400 cubic meters potentially becoming the most massive trees in Scotland.

Native trees inhabiting Gillies Hill including silver birch, rowan, holly, oak, ash, hazel and clinging to the western cliffs, gnarled Scots Pine which form an essential part of this woodland ecosystem, their cones providing an excellent source of pine nuts for native Red Squirrels and Crossbills.

To the west and south of the castle are rows of English yew trees which once formed clipped hedges enclosing stately lawns.

In other areas of the hill, the natural woodland has been replaced with commercial species such as Sitka and Norway Spruce, which form dense canopies limiting undergrowth; and larch, a non-native deciduous conifer, which allows sunlight to penetrate to the ground flora.

Perhaps the most intriguing and perplexing organisms found on Gillies Hill are the slime moulds,[tone] whose plasmodia (masses of protoplasm) slowly moves along wood substrates engulfing particles of food in an amoeba-like manner; an example of this organism, the Red Raspberry Slime Mold, was found in late summer 2009 at the Wallstale Dun.

Its tell-tale signs include large dreys in trees, scratch marks on bark, and chewed Scots pine cones.

Many species of small birds such as robins, dunnocks, green finches, siskin, woodcocks, and tits reside in the woodlands of Gillies Hill.

Large corvids, the crows and the ravens, also inhabit the hill along with raptors such as the peregrine falcon which has been spotted on the western quarry cliffs.

Palmate newts inhabit little Loch Kruse (named after the Texas botanist, Dale Kruse, who studied its sedges and rushes) at the top of Gillies Hill and common toads have been found in the vicinity of Polmaise Castle and its walled garden 88 invertebrate species have been documented on Gillies Hill so far; molluscs, arachnids, annelids and insects which include bumblebees, wasps, ants and sawflies, damselflies, dragonflies, caddisflies, grasshoppers, stoneflies, backswimmers, butterflies, moths, house flies, ants, knapweed bugs, water striders, aphids, and a myriad of beetles.