Falkirk; Sunday, 12 July, 2026

I had another great nights sleep, and looking at the weather forecast, likely to be the last for at least another 10 days, a bit of a lie in and then a late breakfast before checking out of the hotel and heading back in the direction of the Falkirk wheel, although this time taking a different route as I cut away from the canal and headed a little bit in land.

The main reason for the Forth and Clyde canal’s location is because this is at the narrowest point on the Scottish mainland making it the ideal location to house over two millennia of routes from the modern Roads, Rails and Canals back to the Romans and their ill-fated Antonine Wall.

Constructed around 143, 20 years after the much more famous Hadrian’s wall some 80 miles to the south, this represented the furthest North that the Roman empire ever occupied for any time, with the wall making the northern boundary for around 20 years until the Romans realised they couldn’t make it work and they abandoned the site, falling back to Hadrian’s Wall. Consequently, the wall was never expanded beyond basic earth embankments and a central ditch, with a few wooden fortifications dotted along the way, meaning very little remains to today other than the line of the embankments.

Falkirk, close to the start of the wall (as it is to the Forth and Clyde Canal) is home to some of the best-preserved sections of the wall, with the section around the former Watling Lodge Fortlet being on one of the routes I could use to get from the hotel to the wheel, so I diverted that way to have a look around the site.

After taking in the wall I continued on to the Wheel itself, having booked onto the 13:10 tour that starts at the visitors centre at the bottom of the wheel where you board a boat that sails into the wheel, gets lifted the 27m up to the top aqueduct and then sail the 500m or so through the Roughcastle tunnel to the base of the locks that link into the Union Canal and then back to the wheel for a descent back to the visitors centre.

Prior to it’s closure the Union Canal which links Falkirk to the centre of Edinburgh had ended a good mile or so further back with a flight of 11 locks linking down the slope to the Forth and Clyde canal somewhere around the site of that canals lock 16, creating a giant canal junction there, even if it did take most of a day for a boat to be able to descend or ascend the flight.

After the canals closure the flight of locks was filled in and is now buried deep below a major housing estate, so that wasn’t an option when it came to reopening the canal link. Instead, a new section of canal was dug further along the ridge and then the Falkirk Wheel, the worlds first (and so far only) rotating boat lift was constructed to take a day’s travel through 11 locks down to five minutes spin on a wheel enabling ships to rise and fall at the same time.

I spent a bit more time wandering around the site before following the signs out across to Rough Castle, the Antonine wall fort that the canal tunnel is named after. This is a much larger and more open site than Watling Lodge and it’s much easier to make out the line of the wall, though it takes quite a bit of imagination, squinting and looking at aerial maps to actually make out the site of the fort itself.

From Rough Castle I retraced my steps back to the Falkirk Wheel and then followed the Union canal back for about a mile, before cutting down towards my hotel to pick up my bags and head to the station to start the journey home.