The Falkirk Wheel(scottishcanals.co.uk) |
The Falkirk Wheel(scottishcanals.co.uk) |
One fun thing if you have kids is that the playground there has some demonstrations of Archimedean principles, like how an Archimedes screw works. Also, I don't keep many souvenirs of my travels, but I do have a refrigerator magnet of the Falkirk wheel that spins freely. It doubles as a cat toy.
Another way to think about it is to stop somewhere outside of Edinburgh. Edinburgh is an easy half-day trip away. Walk 200 yards of the Royal Mile from the castle. It just repeats with the same kind of tourist shops for the rest of it. Now get back in your car and go and see some of Scotland!
You won't be able to drive from Edinburgh to even Kyle and back in a day, never mind up to Dunvegan. You just won't.
I could drive you from Edinburgh to Dunvegan and back in a day but I can absolutely guarantee you're going to hate every single terrifying mile of the journey and you won't get to see much.
Callendar House, Falkirk Wheel, the Kelpies...
Also not far from Culross or Stirling, which also work as a nice day out.
It's also near a fort on the Antonine Wall, a further-north version of Hadrian's wall- so it's been the shortest route across Britain for quite a long time...
The Scots are descended from an Irish Gaelic (Celtic) tribe who migrated from Ireland to Scotland in the 5th Century [0] (when all three of Britain's countries were created, it was a fascinating century).
The Romans were there before then, and left before then. The walls they built were to keep the Picts out (though this gets fuzzy - the line between "Pict" and "Briton" isn't as clear as conventional Victorian history books say).
One of the interesting things that I heard about the walls, and may or may not be true (I'd be interested if anyone has an update) is that the Romans never explored the top of the island, or sailed around it, and just assumed there was a lot more of it going north. If they'd known how close they were to the end, they might have just conquered all of it, which would probably have been less effort than building those two walls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel#/media/File:Falk...
YouTube version: https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/11/17/the-hidden-eng...
It has nothing to do with the article but this is the first time I can remember Falkirk being discussed on HN!
The kelpies are connected via the canal, maybe 4 miles of locks you have to go through if you want to hire a canal boat to travel from the wheel to the kelpies.
I'll repost what I shared last time though, there's another much older boat lift on the canal network that solves a similar problem of transporting boats from the canal up and down to a river, but built with Victorian engineering instead (though it's been retrofitted a few times) called the Anderton Boat Lift, and it's worth a visit!
https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/things-to-do/museums-and-attr...
The UK's canal network as a whole is fantastic, and definitely worth a day out on if you've got the time.
The wheel is a one-of-a-kind, but there are other ways of avoiding having a ladder of flood locks, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat_lift
I really liked this one in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_Lift_Lock Built as a real working lift lock (originally 1904), rather than as a tourist attraction. Powered by a little bit of extra water in one of the buckets to tip the balance and drive the pistons.
Newspaper-style units, but laughter aside, I tried to do the math.
If a kettle is rated at 2.5kW, then five minutes of usage (to boil a kettle, or for eight of them do a turn of the bridge) is 2.5kWh * (5/60) * 8 = 1.6kW.
My Nissan Leaf stores about 24kWh. So it's about 7% of a Leaf's battery to turn the wheel, or 10km of range. Given mass, perhaps it is finely balanced, and that seems more reasonable than I expected.
I am not an electricity expert and will get things mixed up ;)
Not only is it balanced, because the boats displace water when they enter, if one side has a boat and the other doesn't, it still balances.
Practical Engineering YouTube did a video "the hidden engineering behind the Falkirk wheel" two months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq6ZOVbKQhY
Even if just for novelty purposes.
it's a lot smaller than I imagined. I can't picture a river barge fitting in it, but it's hard to tell the scale
As with the railways, we built early, to a small gauge, and lived with the consequences of that later.
Hence the name "narrowboat".
Its design is TERRIFYING.
The boat is floated into a tube that get sealed at both ends and then (in the dark..) that tube is winched down into a completely flooded chamber until it (hopefully) lines up with the egress port at the bottom. The tube with the boat in is unsealed and the boat floats out.
> The May 1799 test at Oakengates carried a party of investors aboard the vessel, who nearly suffocated before they could be freed.
(!) ...and eventually they built a flight of nineteen locks instead, with a steam-powered pump to return water. The lift locks (and Falkirk Wheel) are a really impressive and elegant solution in comparison.
- early good quality cast iron; Abraham Darby in Coalbrookdale in ~1710 smelting iron from low-sulphur coal/coke for the first time, dominating the market in iron pots and pans.
- his foundry casting iron parts for early Newcomen steam engines in 1715 [2].
- the first iron bridge in the world[3] in 1781, now a town called Ironbridge. John Wilkinson invented a method of boring accurate cylinders for Bolton & Watt static steam engines, a friend wrote to him about the proposed iron bridge and he funded it.
- the first iron boat in 1787 in Brosely; the Trial by the same John Wilkinson, "convincing the unbelievers who were 999 in 1000".[7]
- the first iron framed building in the world, ancestor of skyscrapers. Thomas Telford[5] was a surveyor and engineer in the area, took inspiration from the iron bridge and started making other things out of iron, became friends with a flax mill owner whose mill burned down; they decided an iron framed building would be more fire resistant, and they built the first one ever[6] in 1797.
- very early high-pressure steam engine and high-pressure steam locomotive. Richard Trevithick around 1800; Coalbrookdale foundries built a static high pressure engine and a high pressure locomotive[4] within a couple of years of his Puffing-devil road locomotive and Pen-y-Darren rail locomotive were trialled in other parts of the UK.
Then Regression To The Mean happened and the area faded back into history.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Bridge
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine#Co...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Bridge
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Trevithick#Puffing_Dev...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Telford
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrewsbury_Flaxmill_Maltings
> The town is at the junction of the Forth and Clyde and Union Canals, a location which proved key to its growth as a centre of heavy industry during the Industrial Revolution. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Falkirk was at the centre of the iron and steel industry, underpinned by the Carron Company in nearby Carron. The company made very many different items, from flat irons to kitchen ranges to fireplaces to benches to railings and many other items, but also carronades for the Royal Navy and, later, manufactured pillar boxes and phone boxes. Within the last fifty years, heavy industry has waned, and the economy relies increasingly on retail and tourism.
So, yes, deindustrialization. But being at a key canal junction doesn't mean much today, since modern railroads and steamships rendered the canals obsolete a century-ish ago.
That is true for the English narrow channels which are way too narrow to support any kind of large vessel, but not true in general - the Mittellandkanal in Germany for example still sees a huge amount of traffic and there’s regular infrastructure investment going on into the canal network in many places. One example is the new boat lift in Niederfinow which is not as architecturally beautiful as the Falkirk wheel, but lifts entire river barges.
I'd not be surprised that industrialists would do such a thing as buy up the competition and shut it down, but I'd be a bit surprised if canals were much competition after railways really came in?
Also, the world got a lot bigger, to the extent that a tiny canal was no longer meaningful.
The population of Scotland as a whole has grown slowly and continuously - nothing comparable to the mass depopulation of Ireland, even when you consider the Highland Clearances. It has however mostly concentrated in the economic centers of Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Railway companies did buy and close them though. On one local one they made permanent destructive changes to stop them being easily reopened.
Also to be clear to anyone else reading, "Britons" is referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Britons rather than all citizens of modern Britain. These people were predominantly in Strathclyde and Cumbria. I'm not sure how many of them were around in Roman times to be kept out.
As you say, the Romans departure from north Britain predates "Scotland". They fought with many different tribes north of Hadrian's Wall and the Antonine Wall. From Ptolemy, we have some of the names they gave these tribes: Taexali, Vacomagi, Caledonii, ... We don't know if the tribes call themselves that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland_during_the_Roman_Empi... -> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Britain.north.people... which is based on a 1467 map, which itself is based on Ptolemy's writing.
There was a Roman campaign into northern territories led by Agricola. We know via Tacitus that he (claims to have) soundly defeated "Caledonians" in "Mons Graupius" in 83 AD, which we suspect is one of the Grampian Mountains but we don't know for sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mons_Graupius -> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Agricola.Campaigns.8...
"Our findings support a prevailing view that the Picts descended from Iron Age groups in Britain and Ireland." - https://theconversation.com/dna-study-sheds-light-on-scotlan...
Could've been ragebait, to be fair - they weren't interested when people pointed out that things like weather, hours of daylight, travel time were all going to be against them (or even that the Lake District is a pretty tourist-friendly place to start with).
Not in Scotland, some of them aren't dualled (just a single carriageway in each direction), narrow, windey, full of terrible potholes and animals you can hit etc... its a 5-6 hour drive in reality
source: Live in Edinburgh
What's worse is that the inbuilt mapping in a lot of new cars think bits of it are 70mph dual carriageway when it's still single carriageway, and vice-versa.
The A9 is the most dangerous road in Europe, and you'll be doing 50mph at most along that because there's nowhere to overtake and that's the maximum speed trucks can go at, so you'll end up in a queue behind a truck.
Depending on the route you take, you might go through Inverness, in which case once you get off the A9 most of the road you'll be on looks like this, for about 120 miles: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9L5cSejT1eyAVR2E7
Once you get to Dalwhinnie you can turn off the A9 and start heading across to the A82, which is really pretty especially in the snow but will be mostly road like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/qv1L21jk59EEAHZs9
Notice how it's not actually wide enough for two cars? But that's still a 60mph road, although you'd be lucky to be getting up to more than about 50mph.
And you'll be driving on the wrong side of the road, in an unfamiliar car, with a manual gearbox.
Good luck.
The US interstate is probably more comparable with UK motorways.
I shouldn't think there are many places you can reach a peak speed of 83mph for long on the whole road.
