Houn's Journal: OH, THE WHEEL KEEPS ON TURNIN’

Date: Sept. 10.
Linlithgow Palace is one of only four royal palaces in Scotland and was the birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots. Built like a fortress on the banks of Linlithgow Loch, it is HUGE and still looks majestic, even in a semi-ruined state. This was alleged to be the finest building of its day, with a wealth of masonry carvings. Here’s a rendition of its entryway back then, and a photo of how it looks now, minus the turrets (you can still see their bases in front of the buttresses).

The palace is built as a square, with a large courtyard within. The centerpiece of the courtyard is an elaborate fountain which, in the summer tourist months, is activated. Alas, no water for us.

The fountain was built by Scotland’s King James V in 1537-8 to symbolize his power and sophistication. It was intended as a message to England’s Henry VIII (and to some of James’ own nobles). The crown at the top, with its closed arches, declares Scotland’s independence and the King’s superiority, subject to no one save God. Wonder how that worked out? At any rate, the carvings are elaborate. Water and stone form an inevitable recipe for erosion, and the statue needed constant attention over the centuries. In the 1930s it had to be dismantled and rebuilt, and in 2000 it was removed altogether for a total restoration, with about two-thirds of the original having to be replaced. It was re-unveiled in 2005.
Here are three sides (not sure what was going on with my camera; I think the sensor was beginning to die).

This little blurb interprets the carvings.
Photo below is from the web.

As I said, this place was huge. Dozens of spiral staircases turned our calves to jelly. The main sidewalls were built in the 13th-15th centuries.

The view from the top, looking out over one of the buttresses, wasn’t too shabby.

Altho, not quite so nice if you had to be inside looking out through the barred windows. And, some of those many spiral stairs were a little dicey.

The Great Hall lived up to its name. Here’s the fireplace end of it! Roast elephant, anyone?

The royal chambers on the upper levels were equally impressive.

Another view from the top out over the Loch. Did I mention we were having spectacular weather?

Looking down into the courtyard, towards the old main entrance.

Our next stop was perhaps the most bizarre of our trip. Not ancient, for sure, but a spectacularly modern feat of engineering: the great Falkirk Wheel.

[Note the elephant carved in the rock!]
Also called The Millennium Link, the Wheel was an ambitious £84.5m project with the objective of restoring navigability across Scotland on the historic Forth & Clyde and Union Canals. A major challenge was to link the Forth and Clyde Canal, which lay 35m (115ft) below the level of the Union Canal. Historically, the two canals had been joined at Falkirk by a flight of 11 locks that stepped down across a distance of 1.5km, but these were dismantled in 1933, breaking the link. What was required was a method of connecting these two canals by way of a boat lift. The solution was a truly spectacular and fitting structure that would suitably commemorate the Millennium and act as an iconic symbol for years to come: a perfectly balanced structure --the world's first and only rotating boat lift. Completion of The Millennium Link project was officially marked by Her Majesty The Queen on 24 May 2002.
The Union canal isn’t particularly impressive, at least not where it joins this project, as in the upper left picture below. It disappears into the Roughcastle tunnel you see in front of the boat, and emerges about 200 yards later (below left pic) to a lagoon that is the entrance to the aqueduct that leads to the Wheel boat lift (large pic). I did a LOT of walking to get these shots, so appreciate them! Those arches are the same ones (foreshortened in this shot) as you see in the first picture above that shoots the canal from below.

The Falkirk Wheel lies at the end of that reinforced concrete aqueduct. Boats entering the Wheel's upper gondola are lowered, along with the water that they float in, to the basin below. At the same time, an equal weight rises up, lifted in the other gondola.
See the ghostly me taking this shot?
The whole process is made a lot clearer in the photos below which show the whole sequence. A boat from the upper canal goes into the top gondola, and one from the lower canal, going the other direction, is placed in the bottom gondola. Then the whole thing rotates, lifting one and descending the other. It’s a miracle of efficiency. Given the precise balancing of the gondolas and a simple but clever system of cogs, a very small amount of energy is actually required to turn the Wheel. In fact, it is a group of ten hydraulic motors located within the central spine that use just 1.5kWh, of electricity to turn it, the same amount as it would take to boil 8 household kettles. Amazing.
In this picture, you can see the last two sections of the aqueduct leading to the crescent shapes of the Wheel. The wheels of the upper gondola can be seen in the upper cradle.

OK, here it goes.

While the actual time for the Wheel to rotate isn’t much (five minutes or so), it takes forever for them to get the boats in place in the gondolas, secure everything, and get started. All in all, this was one of our best stops.
Watching all this work made us hungry, so we beetled off to the ancient town of Culross, on the Firth of Forth, that supposedly had been restored to its 16thy and 17th century look. Hmmm. Maybe. Most everything was closed, and we didn’t see a whole lot that was interesting other than the golden ochre houses (which, we later learned, were only temporarily painted that color for a t.v. program.