When we went to the Falkirk Wheel to see the pop-up opera I invested in a book called '111Things to see in Falkirk and the Lothians'. I didn't realise when I bought it that it's a bit of an international series, but it makes no matter, it does what it says on the can - brief descriptions of and directions to some of the interesting places and sights that might otherwise get overlooked. It will take us a long time to get round all 111, I think before we bought the book we had visited all of four under our own steam. Luckily they tend to be grouped together a bit, so that we won't be driving all the way over to, say, East Lothian for one solitary thing, but it's going to take a bit of getting our heads round and a bit of planning.
Anyway we were over the holiday and I hadn't been out of the house for a couple of days so yesterday we had a quick look at where we might like to go and alighted on the Falkirk Tunnel.
This is a half mile long tunnel built for a stretch of the Clyde canal, basically because the family in the local big house couldn't cope with the thought that the canal and the boats on it could be seen from their windows, or possibly just from one small corner of their extensive grounds into which no-one but the fourth undergardener ever ventured, but whichever of those it was, they launched a massive lobbying campaign with the result that this tunnel was built so that the gentry didn't have to watch the low lifes carrying stuff about on barges.
It was built largely by Irish immigrant labour, ( that applies to the whole project, not just the tunnel, and amongst the many men who worked on it were two called Burke and Hare, truly a couple of names to conjure with. This would be before they removed to Edinburgh and started plying a more grisly trade ....
The tunnel was wet and the towpath uneven and dark because some of the lighting ( well quite a lot of the lighting ) wasn't working. I'm not going to pretend that walking through it was a highlight experience of my life to date, but I am rather proud of myself for making it all the way through.* I did however refuse to countenance going back the same way so we walked along the towpath until we could rejoin the road. Sadly it was absolutely tipping it down with rain by then, and we got soaked. Going back through the tunnel would have kept us drier, but I suspect would have given me the temporary heebie-jeebies.
At the far end there's a bridge with two contrasting faces on it; the unhappy one looks towards the town of Falkirk and the happy one out over the hills. Photos below, they are quite high up and I was just using the phone camera so not as brilliant as I might like but you can definitely see the contrasting expressions.
* This makes me a total wuss. Some people were running through it on what was obviously a normal running toute for them.
I don’t think I could even have gone into it. Well done for making it through!!
ReplyDelete