Our tour ended today after breakfast so we decided to take a field trip to see the Falkirk Wheel and The Kelpies. [info from Rick Steves' Scotland guide book]
The 115-foot-tall (35 m) Falkirk Wheel, opened in 2002, is a modern take on this classic engineering challenge: linking the Forth and Clyde Canal below with the aqueduct of the Union Canal, 80 feet (24 m) above. Rather than using rising and lowering water, the wheel simply picks boats up and—ever so slowly—takes them where they need to go, like a giant waterborne elevator. In the 1930s, it took most of a day to ascend or descend through 11 locks; now it takes only five minutes.
Here is a boat in the lower gondola of the Wheel.
Then it slowly gets lifted up to the canal 80 ft above.
We signed up for a boat ride which took us from the lower canal to the upper one, turned around, then took us back down again. It was great fun.
This is the view out the front when we got to the top.
And this is the view after we turned around.
This is the view out the front just before we started back down.
We also visited the Kelpies. Unveiled in 2014 and standing over a hundred feet tall ("the largest equine sculptures in the world"), these two giant steel horse heads have quickly become a symbol of the region. They may seem whimsical, but they’re rooted in a mix of mythology and real history: Kelpies are magical, waterborne, shape-shifting sprites of Scottish lore, who often took the form of a horse. And historically, horses were used to tow heavily laden barges. The sculptures are 300 tons of steel apiece, sitting upon a foundation of 1,200 tons of steel-reinforced concrete, and gleaming with 990 steel panels.
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