IAN MITCHELL
explores Scotland's reborn Forth & Clyde canal with
Black Prince Holidays Stoke Prior, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, B60 4LA (01527 575115).

FACT FILE From Glasgow or Edinburgh, Falkirk is easily accessible. By car in little over half an hour from each (ample parking), or by Scotrail to Falkirk High station on the Glasgow Edinburgh line, trains every 15 minutes.

Falkirk Wheel, Lime Road, Tamfourhill, Falkirk FKI 4RS (01324 619888).

British Waterways (Scotland) Canal House,
l, Applecross Street, Glasgow G4 9SP.

.
 It is easy to close a canal, much harder to reopen it. Finished in the 1790s, the Forth & Clyde Canal was the artery of Scotland's Industrial Revolution. Always devoted to carrying industrial freight, as this declined so too did the canal and it was closed in 1962, large sections being subsequently infilled or overbuilt. For three decades it was forgotten, apart from by those who dumped old cars and shopping trolleys into it, and by canal enthusiasts crying in the wilderness.
   In the 1990s increasing recreational usage and the restoration of sections of the canal led to the ambitious project to reopen it along its entire length, as a Millennium Project, reinstating locks, repairing canal banks and developing an infrastructure for recreational boating use.
   After an expenditure in excess of £84 millions, the canal was eventually reopened in 2001, and since then various organisations have been making great efforts to ensure the venture is a success. As one who has walked, cycled and now boated the canal for over three decades, I can report that things are moving in the right direction.

.
   Although the term Forth and Clyde is used to designate the 37 miles from Bowling on the Clyde to Grangemouth on the Forth, the network of reopened canals is greater, including as it does the Union Canal into Edinburgh, and the branch line off the Forth & Clyde into Glasgow, making it now possible to visit Scotland's two great cities by pleasure craft. The hub of the canal system, where the Union joins the Forth & Clyde, is the town of Falkirk. Here are based many of the companies offering boat hire on the canal, as well as the unmissable Falkirk Wheel, where twenty-first century engineering has been applied to solve one of the problems created by the restoration of an eighteenth century canal at a cost of £18 millions.
   Originally the Union was joined to the Forth and Clyde by 11 locks over 35 yards. But the cost of reinstating these plus the time it would take to get boats through the locks, led to the radical solution of the world's first rotating boat lift, the staggeringly beautiful Falkirk Wheel.

/continued below