The Sights of Scotland

The ship I've been intermittently working on for the past few years has a lot of Scottish people onboard who had given me plenty of advice upon places to see in that there Haggistan. Eilean Donan Castle was one that I wanted to have a nose at but was a bit too far out of my way. The first and last of the three places I visited today were from suggestions, the middle one was my must see.

During the 1850's, for some reason or another the Victorians fell in love with the story of William Wallace. Enough that in 1861 they started building a monument to him on the Abbey Craig, a hilltop overlooking Stirling and a pebbles throw from the university. After a rather nice breakfast in the halls I rode to the visitor centre where they have lockers to pop your bike textiles in whilst there and the nice lady in the gift shop looked after my lid as it wouldn't quite fit. I walked up the hill and climbed the 67 metre high gothic styled monument to a chap who undoubtedly looked and spoke nothing like Mel Gibson. It's a beautiful building though and the chambers inside detail both the battle of Stirling Bridge and the works of other famous people from Scotland, it's well worth a visit. The views from the top over the town and surrounding hills are stunning too. Unsurprisingly I heard a lot of American accents in the tower.

 With more rain being threatened I hopped back on the bike and headed twelve miles down the road for the star attraction of today, the Falkirk Wheel. A few years back after a trackday at Oulton Park I visited the Anderton Boat Lift near Northwich which is one of the finest pieces of Victorian engineering I've ever seen. The only other working boat lift in the UK is the much newer Falkirk Wheel and for a while I'd been waiting for a chance to visit.

The visitor centre is in a swathe of parkland that you need to pay to park in, even for a motorbike if visiting for more than fifteen minutes but it's really worth it. The boat lift itself if free to visit and watch it's operation from the lower quayside and not long after I arrived I was lucky to watch it perform. It was completed in 2002 and connects the Forth and Clyde with the Union Canal, replacing a series of 11 locks that had fallen into disrepair and been abandoned in the 1930's. The Anderton Boat Lift uses a pair of iron caissons hydraulically linked to raise and lower canal boats 15m between two waterways. The displaced water of a barge means the two caissons weigh the same however loaded and as one sinks, the other rises meaning virtually all the energy required to operate is used to overcome the friction of the seals. The Falkirk Wheel uses two slightly wider steel caissons on opposite sides of a large geared wheel to raise and lower canal boats through 24m vertically, although the distance they actually travel is obviously longer as it's around an arc. The Anderson lift takes about the same energy as boiling a kettle, the Falkirk wheel about eight kettles, although it can move twice as many boats at a time and over a longer distance.

They also had to build an aqueduct to bring the canal boats out of the hillside to where there's space for the wheel to rotate. It's so graceful when it's moving and captivating to watch.

And to access the aqueduct they had to dig a 180m tunnel through the hill which has the earthwork remains of a Roman fort upon. The tunnel is lit up with ever changing coloured lights and is home to a lot of breeding house martins too.

 
There is one more lock at the end of the tunnel to get to the Union canal, and another lock below the wheel to get to the Forth and Clyde, but before the wheel was made it used to take the crews of the barges a whole day to get through the staircase of locks.

In short, I give the Falkirk Wheel four stars out of five. The Anderton still reigns supreme in the battle of the boat lifts.