The Canal
Growing up a few blocks from the Mississippi River, I was familiar with locks and dams, especially the giant lock near St. Anthony Falls — a water elevator that could move two barges almost 100 feet up and over the falls. The locks of the Crinan Canal here in western Scotland seem almost dainty in comparison — though still an impressive bit of engineering.
The Crinan Canal was built in the late 1700s — 9 miles dug across the land to connect the Inner Hebrides to the Firth of Clyde (which leads to Glasgow). It was built both to create a shorter route between Glasgow and the Hebrides and to allow boats to avoid the dangerous waters around the tip of the peninsula that we’re staying on.
I like walking next to canals because they’re flat, it’s impossible to get lost, and you get to see fun boats. And you’ll always find a path next to a canal — the paths were built for the teams of horses that used to pull unpowered boats through the canals.
Andy and I went to explore the final mile or so of the Crinan Canal the other day. For an area so remote, it was surprisingly busy. There was a little town at the end of the canal with beautiful views over the Sound of Jura and the teeniest little lighthouse I’ve ever seen. Two guys in a canal boat were in one of the locks, waiting for the water to fill up and get them to the next section. It seemed like it would take hours for it to fill up, but by the time Andy and I had wandered back from checking out the giant sea lock - which allows boats to enter the canal from the sea no matter the tide level - the little canal boat had made it through.
As we walked back to the car, we noticed a person and their dog on the Sound who seemed to be walking on water. But it wasn’t a miracle - we realized the tide was low and only a very shallow bit of water covered the land. Miles and miles of mudflats spread out before us — I still can’t get used to the dramatic shifts in coastline here and the tides’ constant shaping and unshaping of the landscape.
A few days later, I went back, crossing one of the seven bridges that dot the Crinan Canal and walking the other direction towards the Firth of Clyde. To my left was a huge expanse of bog, a vast field of gold between me and the hills in the distance. (More on the exciting world of bogs in an upcoming post!). I got a bit distracted spotting cows grazing - it seemed a miracle they didn’t sink into the muck and disappear forever.
The Crinan almost looked like a natural body of water, with grasses and trees and brambles splayed out across the shore. But this eventually gave way to order and a series of locks and reserves. Each of the 15 locks on the canal has a lock keepers cottage, though nowadays, boaters operate the locks themselves (except for the more complicated sea locks, which are still staffed by professionals). This section of the canal had quite a few locks plus a little town with rows of neat whitewashed cottages and slightly chaotic gardens lining the canal.
I reached the bridge that we take when driving across the canal to get to the nearest town with a grocery store. Despite its age and seeming delicacy, the one-lane bridge is astonishingly strong. I’ve seen a logging truck filled with tree trunks and a giant tractor pulling another tractor cross that bridge without the thing collapsing.
I continued on to what seemed to be a more remote section of the canal — just me, the birds, and an occasional mountain biker. This section of the canal had collapsed quite early in its history — it seems like the whole thing was actually a bit of a mess, so they called in the famous engineer Thomas Telford to sort it out.
I’d come across Thomas Telford’s work earlier in this trip, in Wales. He designed the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, basically a boat bridge over 100 feet in the air that’s part of the Ellesmere Canal. It’s a surreal and slightly disorienting experience to walk across a bridge with boats chugging along it. A river in the air that’s a testament to skilled engineering and skilled workers with innovative techniques, including using Welsh flannel and lead, dipped into boiling sugar, to seal the bridge.
Traffic along the Crinan started to pick up again once I got close to Lochgilphead, the “big town” in the area, with houses on one or both sides of the canal all the way out to the end. I saw more bits of engineering ingenuity, including an automatic gravity-powered system to let water out of the canal if the water got too high. Finally, seven miles after I’d started, I reached the end, capped off with another tiny lighthouse.
I headed back to Lochgilphead to meet Andy at the grocery store. As I left the Crinan to go into town, I realized I hadn’t seen a single boat moving on the water! A beautiful, sunny Saturday with nobody enjoying the water?! Quite a change from the 33,000 passengers and 27,000 sheep that sailed the canal each year in the 1800s…
Too cool