Today, we re going on a wonderful canal boat ride from Linlithgow Basin here to Falkirk Wheel,
and along the way I m going to tell you how this canal came about.
If you re interested in the people, places and events in Scottish history
then click the subscribe button at the bottom right of the screen.
In the meantime, let me tell you a story
This channel is about the People places and events in Scottish history.
Now today, as I take a trip on the Union Canal, it may seem like it s about the place,
but this place is inextricably linked to people and events:
murder, revolution and global domination are all part of the story of The Union Canal.
We ll end today s journey at The Falkirk Wheel
which, I suppose is kind of where the story of the canal eventually takes us.
But the best way to get to The Falkirk Wheel is to start in West Lothian.
Here, in the Linlithgow Basin, you ll find the Linlithgow Union Canal Society.
They run regular boat trips. Depending on when you re watching this,
you can book a trip to take you to the second highest aqueduct in the UK,
locations of Scotland s industrial dominance, or the post-industrial renewal of modern
technical ingenuity. Today the Linlithgow Union Canal Society
well I think I know them well enough to call them LUCS for short ,
because they ve generously given us one of their boats
and a friendly boatman for our own special trip. You can find out more about them in the Linlithgow
section of the Visit West Lothian website here link in the description below...
Today the canal is a place of leisure, peace and tranquillity,
but it started with hard work, revolution and heavy industry.
It was built when nobody could have imagined the road network of today.
Transport was at a sedate pace by or carriage, or on rough roads or gliding through water
When the industrial revolution took hold Lanarkshire, then West Lothian
became integral parts of it. But how to transport goods,
coal, lime and stone between their source and Scotland s two major cities.
A canal had been built between the Clyde Estuary and the Forth Estuary near here at Grangemouth.
What was needed was another canal to join Glasgow to Edinburgh.
Ultimately The Union Canal would bring Glasgow and Edinburgh together physically if not culturally.
They re still two very different cities. I always say, you can stand at a bus stop
in Glasgow and make a friend for life. You can stand at a bus stop in Edinburgh
for life and never make a friend. They re very different towns.
I always think that s because Edinburgh was built on dour Scottish Presbyterianism,
whereas Glasgow, and indeed West Lothian, had an influx of Gaels, from the Scottish
Highlands and Catholic Ireland which has left a cultural difference between the towns.
You might have a different explanation and feel free to let me know in the comments.
In fact, let me know which is you re preferred town and why?
The point is that Edinburgh needed coal, so they wanted a canal to bring it to them.
This Union canal took four years to build but it took 25 years to decide to build it.
In 1793 a group of subscribers and investors got together and commissioned
a report by a chief engineer and a surveyor who had both worked on the Forth and Clyde canal.
They came up with four different possible routes.
One of the routes would have meant the highest canal system in Britain, CR
taking the canal over 800 feet in height CR through a system of more than 100 locks
to bring coal up and over the hills CR from the Clyde basin to Edinburgh.
Their report took three years and, like any good committee, the subscribers
sent it to another engineer to be reviewed.
Like any good engineer he looked at the proposals and said: No, no, no, no, no.
You don t want to do that. What you want is a contour canal.
Everyone nodded in agreement Nobody actually knew what a contour
canal was, but it seemed like a damned good idea. So a contour canal follows the contours of the
land always remaining at the same height... like contour lines
invented by a Scotsman twenty years before. The upside was that they wouldn t need to build
lock systems CR to take water up and down hills. The downside is that you d need
to build bridges like these You would also need to build viaducts.
You re probably also going to need a longer canal to find a suitable route
and that might have to go through land that people already had plans for
like a bathroom extension. Obviously, I m joking.
Ordinary people didn t have bathrooms and powerful people thought it was much
more important to fight Napoleon. So everything was put on hold.
By the time the Napoleonic wars were over somebody had found coal near here
on the south side of the Firth of Forth. As Edinburgh New Town was being built, stone
needed to be moved to Edinburgh, but as The New town was growing
coal was in demand as well. High demand and lack of availability
meant Leith merchants charging prices
nobody wanted to pay. Hmmmmm,
why build a canal over the hills to Glasgow when you could connect up with the Forth
and Clyde Canal and pick up some
coal here whilst you were at it. The Contour canal north it is then!
Better get another report done. A new report was written by renowned
engineer Hugh Baird for a contour canal to join the Forth and Clyde.
No lesser man than Thomas Telford, who probably deserves his own video,
said it was the most perfect inland navigation between Edinburgh and Glasgow
Let s get digging. Ah well actually,
That s when Robert Stevenson chipped in
You know the lighthouse builder guy , son Robert Louis wrote Treasure Island,
Kidnapped, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide.
He pointed out that Port Dundas at the Glasgow, end of the Forth and Clyde canal
was on the same level as the Norloch in Edinburgh.
You could run a contour canal through Princess Street Gardens and end up under North Bridge.
You could join it to the Forth and Clyde canal just west of Castlecary.
Contour canal. One level, no locks, you could take passengers,
they d love it The only problem was that you would need
to build a three-mile tunnel near Winchburgh. That ll take the cost up to 400 000
and passengers might not like going under a 3 mile tunnel.
But what we ll do is we ll take them off the canal boat
and transport them the three miles by coach so they don t have to go through the tunnel.
It ll be the world s first, and undoubtedly shittest bus replacement service.
Our driver could tell you the story much better than I can,
but long story short, to avoid building a tunnel
they took the route through West Lothian that allows us to enjoy the
hospitality of LUCS today. Of course, today this is all
calm and tranquillity, but can you imagine what it was like during construction?
Workers flooded down from the Highlands and across from Ireland to dig,
blow up, carry and dispose of tons of earth and rock each day.
It must have been back braking work. I don t fancy it.
Two Irish lads, who met up whilst digging the Union Canal here, didn t fancy it either
and looked for easier work opportunities. Coincidentally they were both called William.
One was William Burke, and the other was William Hare.
I m guessing most of you have heard of them but in case you haven t ,
at this time of great advancement in engineering, similar advances were being made in medicine
but to aid those advancements medical researchers needed cadavers to work on.
Ordinary folk called them dead bodies, but the point is that they d pay hard cash
in return for recently deceased corpses. Burke and Hare decided that digging graves
at night was much easier than digging canals in the daytime
and better paid too. Then they thought: Hold on!
If we just happen to be there at the point the person becomes a cadaver,
we won t have to do any digging at all.
Long story short, they went on a mad killing spree in order to give bodies to medical science
a bit like when oil companies donate to charity today.
Anyway, the canal was opened in 1822. By the 1830s a typical week saw more than
80 barges with 3000 tons of coal alone going through Linlithgow, to Edinburgh...
but there was other industrial freight like stone, lime and other building materials
for the burgeoning Edinburgh New Town.
On the way back, manure from the hundreds of horses working in town
would be transported to canalside farms out here.
In 1840 83,000 tons of coal, 25,000 tons of stone and 28,000 tons of manure would pass here.
There were Passage boats for folk who wanted to travel from Edinburgh to Glasgow
and could afford the speed and comfort of a seven-hour journey.
There were night boats, with sleeping facilities, boats carrying general
cargo and steerage class passengers who didn t have the money for comforts.
In 1836The Union Canal carried 127,292 passengers.
Don t worry, when you come on your trip, you won t have to worry about the manure.
It ll be rose scented canal banks with chit chat and banter from one of the volunteer drivers.
The Canal was busy and outwardly successful but, it was a financial disaster.
You see the owners of Callander House in Falkirk didn t want to spoil the view from the house.
I can sympathise with that But, so that the posh folk didn t have to see
the canal from their living room window the engineers had to build a
two-thousand-and-seventy-foot tunnel... on the route they d chosen to avoid a tunnel!
That made the final costs higher than the one proposed by Stevenson.
Doh! In 1840,
a rail line was built from Glasgow to Slamannan, so Glasgow passengers could take a train part way
to Edinburgh before getting the canal boat. That took the journey time down to four hours.
Eight years later a railway was built all the way from Glasgow to Edinburgh
and Waverley train station was built at exactly the place that Stevensen s proposal would have
put the Edinburgh canal basin. How ironic.
Of course, over time the canal fell out of use and was officially
closed to commercial traffic in 1933, less than a hundred years after it opened.
Eventually some parts were built over with motorway, locks were filled in to allow housing
and the parts of the canal that were navigable became weed strewn,
although this did provide the perfect habitat for breeding pairs of shopping trolleys.
It all culminated in 1965 with the Union Canal being formally closed
in the same way it was started with an Act of Parliament.
31 miles long and a marvel of engineering The Union Canal was Scotland's only contour canal.
With a height of 73m all its length they called it the "mathematical river".
It didn t need locks but it did need the second biggest aqueduct in Britain.
Our friends at LUCS run short boat trips out to the viaduct here.
but they also run trips that go even further. You see,
almost as soon as the canal was closed commercially,
people were campaigning for it to be brought back into use for leisure and recreation.
That s when Linlithgow Union Canal Society was born.
Along with others it worked on campaigning and restoration.
and eventually the Millennium Link project led to the reopening of the canal.
Now the Falkirk lock system that had been filled in, so it had to be replaced
by the Falkirk Wheel. This is truly a marvel of modern engineering
and you can take a LUCS boat here to complete your journey
along a marvel of Victorian engineering. The important point is that the way to really
enjoy this is to do what we ve done today, by starting at the Linlithgow Basin
and wake up to the fantastic opportunities that Wet Lothian has to offer.
I ve made more videos about cool stuff to do in West Lothian and there s one coming
up on screen now. In the meantime