When planning our walk, we decided to start during the school Easter holidays, so that Otto could walk with us, but finish if possible before the school summer holidays. However, we failed to realise that Scottish schools start their holidays at the beginning of July! Consequently, booking accommodation is proving more tricky, and the prices have increased! Fortunately, we stayed at a pub last night with good internet (it isn’t always the case) and we have now booked up for the next 12 days, taking us to Fort William via the West Highland Way.

Today was a short walk, giving us a free afternoon. We left Linlithgow in sunshine and joined the John Muir Way, walking through pleasant forest paths beside the River Avon. We soon joined the Union Canal path again which led us most of the way to Falkirk. Unfortunately, this time we weren’t prepared for the weather and had to stop and put on our wet weather gear when we were caught in a downpour! The last part of our walk was along busy streets, and we were glad to arrive at our hotel in time for lunch and a free afternoon.

A Backward Glance

The Union Canal was part of a main artery serving Edinburgh, coal mainly but also a ‘city-link’ to Glasgow from 1822 for 25 years, until Railway competition overtook it. It’s a clever design following ground contours meaning much fewer locks (locks slows things down a bit) but with some impressive aqueducts to take the canal over river valleys en-route. They are of course a legacy of the Industrial Revolution and were built when steam engines were beginning to displace horse power and telegraphing using Morse Code was the ‘smart phone’ of its time. Today it’s enjoying retirement as a leisure facility and looking very good on it, probably telling me something too. If water does have memory, what stories it could tell. Walking canal routes is physically easier than over the hills surrounding them but they were designed primarily to get things from one end to the other and that’s increasingly how we feel about them. Of course they are very beautiful with both water and path maintained well, but are now incorporated into urban infrastructure, and like parks, a bit tame. An upside is that they take us through well connected towns and villages, so accommodation is very good.