I’ve recently found myself wondering how our infrastructure helps to shape our environment and behaviours. We take most of the built networks for granted, mumble when some fall into disrepair and shake our heads when promises of the future are unfathomably delayed.
After long considering the challenge, I decided to run home to Edinburgh after a day at my client’s offices in Glasgow. In fact, this was the last week of company operations here, for the site was condemned and new buildings, elsewhere, were enjoying the handover phase and a planned ribbon-cutting event. But for my place, a fleet of bulldozers were revving up. Wednesday evening’s prognosis was for fair weather and a near full moon. By elevenses, butterflies flitted in my stomach. I was relishing the approaching shift in space and time within the confinement of the busy Central Belt and between one workday and the next. At the back of four pm, I gave thumbs up to my colleagues and left the building.
Befitting a love of the outdoors, I chose the Forth & Clyde and the Union canals as the route. From the gates, I ran. My pace settled a mile or two in, jogging through the back of Lambhill, and I started to think how life was before, during and after the construction of the waterways. Without the combustion engine, the challenge to excavate the dolerite, cart off the debris by horse and bring in materials to strengthen the banks would have been enormous. A temporary society would have congregated by the corridor, with farriers and wheelwrights, tinkers and hookers. Interim bridges might have connected the people between the good and bad sides of the trench.
As the afternoon sun dropped and a six-stride crossing of Kirkintilloch’s Cowgate came and went, I imagined the impact. The channel linked (the rich), divided (the poor) and enabled interaction between all strata. To this you can add the transit of goods, services and ideas, and the affection, ever so subtly, upon the prevalence of flora and fauna. Such change was irreversible. The same is true of the creation of subsequent train, tram and asphalt networks and the designation of today’s urban developments. Clever modern routes involve multi-level crossings, like those used in Canada to let moose pass under the parkways. My opinions on the best of planning initiatives are best left to another journey, another post. Suffice to say that there are no underpasses on the Forth & Clyde for hyrax, lynx or fox.
I ran on and on. Backcasting anglers focused on their translucent lines, which ended in miniature concentric circles on the calm of the drink. People atop the occasional barges waved and tended to their pot plants. Endless reflections of poplars and ash and oak contrasted only with the narrow gardens that spilled out onto the towpath. Assumptions that our canals are ribbons of discarded shopping trolleys and floating Pilsner bottles must be shattered. No, there is pride on the canals of Scotland these days. You only have to visit the Helix by Grangemouth and Falkirk and the fabulous Kelpies sculpture, a M9 white-line drifter between junctions five and seven.
For ten miles I ran along with a friend. We chatted about this and that. Despite the technical difficulties, large projects may have been easier to complete at the end of the eighteenth century than now. The efficacy of adaptation decreases with increasing democratisation, I’m told. In formerly ‘backward’ countries like China, the government can decree that a route shall be built. In Britain, our multi-layered society lets royalist, religious, feudal, merchant, government and capitalist models dance the Gay Gordons with interest groups and quangos. The result is a cacophony of developmental paralysis. However frustrating, this might be the right path for us, a fitting price to pay for stability beyond the reach of most nations.
At the Falkirk Wheel, a triumph of engineering that opened after the Millennium, I climbed the grassy bank to join the younger Union Canal. The scene was immediately darker and narrower. My sore feet pounded the compacted earth. The moon rose. Owls began to hoot. I found it tremendous that, beside the old Lothian coalfield villages, a shaft of water and light and foliage could give such pleasure to the weary commuter.
The chiselled half-mileposts clicked by in the half-darkness. Across Britain there are dozens of canals, with just a handful in Scotland. The Caledonian stitches up the magnificent fault line of the Great Glen. Meanwhile, the Crinan gives light work for sailors otherwise rounding the Mull of Kintyre. The Monkland is a smaller resource that links with the Forth & Clyde. So that’s a total of five, each extremely valuable for nature and recreation.
Less known is the planned-but-never-built scheme to move Dreadnought-class battleships, using one of the natural hourglass constrictions of southern Scotland. Two routes found advocates before the Great War, either of which would have matched the Panama in depth and breadth. But the finances meant that those chipping their influence into the arms race had to pick between boats or infrastructure. If the canal had been started, the imperative would likely have galvanised the mission. You can look at the Alaskan Highway to understand what people can do when the cause is unequivocal.
At Linlithgow, I caught the sound of church bells rippling and the bogeys of the 21:59 for Waverly departing a minute late. The railroad was, of course, the next era in our transport history and must have caused headaches for those who were making their life from the canal. Adapting to change is hard, and we’re facing this right now as never before with the control of information. But by this point, approaching 40 miles on my run, I was too tired to engage in philosophy.
Finally, a light from afar cut a swathe through the night. It was a friend who’d ridden out from Edinburgh. After high fives, he turned to pedal behind me and illuminate my figure. A giant running man extended out front, one whom I could never quite catch. Despite boosting the stride length and stoking the arms, my body was never quick enough. At Winchburgh, I stopped running. For me, 45 miles was enough. We left the towpath and immediately found houses, pavements, roads, taxis and kebab shops. I’d had an adventure that seemed on another planet, yet suburbia had never been more than fifty yards away.
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The Union Canal in Edinburgh
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