Falkirk; Saturday, 11 July, 2026

Back down at home in London the city was entering day 6 of the third heatwave of the summer, with many disrupted nights sleep already under my belt the previous couple of nights in airconditioned hotels in Scotland had allowed me to catch up on some of the missed sleep, and waking up to see that the clouds were heavy outside with a light drizzle speckling the car park, and a forecast high of just 17C, I’d never been so pleased to see poor weather on a trip!

Of course, it did mean getting slightly wet on my way over to breakfast, as I was staying in the annex of this particular Premier Inn rather than the main building. I had a filling breakfast and then went back over to my room for a little while before the long walk across to the other side of the roundabout to visit the Rosebank Distillery for a guided tour and tasting.

The original Rosebank Distillery had opened in 1840 and had kept going until 1993 when it finally closed, in part due to the building of new roads in the area cutting through the site, as well as the economy of the time making small distilleries no longer viable. The site could have been permanently lost and all bar two buildings had either been demolished or reused – with one of the former warehouses becoming the Premier Inn – before the site was saved in 2017 with plans to reopen the distillery. Building works had kicked off in 2019, which as anyone knows means they had Covid cause massive disruption to their plans with the distillery only finally switching on it’s still for the first time in 2023 and opening to tours the following year.

I joined the first tour of the morning, which was a quick walk through the history of the brand and the site before a walk around the main production floor and the small onsite warehouse before moving through to the tasting rooms for a tutored tasting. Naturally as the first barrel of the revived Rosebank was still a week away from turning 3 years old, they don’t have any of their own product from the revival, but they do still have some of the older whisky’s produced before the original distillery closed down, as well as whisky’s from the other distilleries in their group, which formed the basis of the tasting session.

After the tasting session I walked the short distance back into the centre of Falkirk and hopped on the train a couple of miles east to the town of Linlithgow, home to one of the most important royal palaces in Scotland, birthplace of both King James V and his daughter Mary, Queen of Scots. The palace became devoid of purpose when the Stuarts moved down to London to take up the joint crowns of Scotland and England and finally succumbed to a major fire in the 18th century, leaving it as a picturesque ruin. Today it’s been preserved in that ruinous state with lots of places to explore and I spent a good couple of hours looking the palace ruins.

I stopped off quickly in the centre of Linlithgow for a very late lunch and a cup of coffee before heading back to the station and taking the train back to Falkirk where I had a bit more of an explore around the town centre, taking in the graveyard where some of William Wallace’s comrades are buried – Falkirk being an important location in a number of Scottish battles, being halfway between the important centres of Edinburgh and Stirling.

I walked back to the hotel from the centre of town and made use of the on-site restaurant for dinner before heading back out for an evening wander along the canal int the opposite direction, this time heading out to the Falkirk Wheel. The wheel is illuminated at night, but not many people know about it, so it’s a great time to be able to look around the site in peace and quiet.

The only downside is that whilst the site itself is well lit, none of the paths approaching the site are lit, so it’s only really in the middle of summer that you can happily wander back along the canal towpath in the extended twilight after taking in the wheels illuminations without the risk of ending up in the canal waters – this part of the Forth and Clyde still being in water.

By the time I got back to the hotel the light was almost completely gone and for the last hundred meters or so I did need to use the light on my phone to make sure I was staying on the path.