The Falkirk Wheel
The Falkirk Wheel lifts boats 24 metres into the air using about as much energy as boiling a few kettles, and it's the only rotating boat lift of its kind in the world.
Published
Quick Facts
- Location
- Falkirk, central Scotland
- Opened
- 24 May 2002, by Queen Elizabeth II
- Height
- Lifts boats 24 metres; the wheel itself stands about 35 metres tall
- What it joins
- The Forth and Clyde Canal and the Union Canal
- Designer
- Architect Tony Kettle of RMJM
- Steel used
- Around 1,200 tonnes, made in Derbyshire and bolted together on site
- Rotation
- A half turn of 180 degrees, taking around five and a half minutes
- Replaced
- A staircase of 11 locks, closed in the 1930s
The kettle-powered boat lift
The Falkirk Wheel does something that sounds impossible: it picks up boats, with tonnes of water, and swings them through the air without needing much power at all. Turning the wheel uses roughly the energy needed to boil a handful of kettles. The trick is Archimedes' principle. A floating boat pushes aside exactly its own weight in water. So a gondola holding a boat weighs the same as one holding only water, and the two arms of the wheel stay almost perfectly balanced. The motors only have to overcome friction and nudge the whole thing round. Each of the two water-filled gondolas holds around 250,000 litres. A half turn takes about five and a half minutes, and the boats inside never tip, because a set of gears keeps the gondolas level as the arms swing.
A canal link that was ripped out
Scotland's two big canals were once joined here. The Forth and Clyde Canal opened in 1790, and the Union Canal, running from Edinburgh, arrived in 1822. Between them stood a dramatic staircase of 11 locks at Falkirk that lowered boats about 35 metres. The descent was famously slow, taking a good part of a day. As canal traffic declined, the locks were closed in the early 1930s and the link was filled in. For decades the two canals were cut off from each other. The Wheel was the centrepiece of the Millennium Link, a project that reopened the canals across central Scotland, backed by British Waterways and the Millennium Commission. The old staircase was far too expensive to rebuild, so a bold new design was needed.
Axe head, ship's propeller or whale spine?
Architect Tony Kettle and his team at RMJM came up with a design that people have likened to many things. A Celtic double-headed axe, a ship's propeller and the spine of a whale are all cited as inspirations or resemblances. The parts were made by Butterley Engineering in Derbyshire, then trucked north and assembled at Falkirk. Workers used thousands of bolts rather than welds, so that the structure could be put together like a giant engineering kit. The finished machine was opened on 24 May 2002 by Queen Elizabeth II.
The lift is only half the journey
The Wheel does not do the whole climb. It lifts boats 24 metres, and the Union Canal sits higher still. After leaving the Wheel, boats cross an aqueduct and pass through the Rough Castle Tunnel, then ascend a pair of locks to complete the climb to the Union Canal. The tunnel takes the canal underneath the line of the Antonine Wall, the Roman frontier built in the AD 140s. Its protected remains are now part of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire UNESCO World Heritage Site, which the wall joined in 2008, six years after the Wheel opened. So a single trip on a boat takes you through nearly two thousand years of Scottish engineering, from Roman ramparts to the 21st century.
What to look out for
Watch from the bottom basin as a boat noses into a gondola, the gate closes behind it and the whole structure begins its slow, silent turn. It looks too graceful for something so heavy. Pay attention to the gates. The gondola and canal ends are sealed before the lift moves, and the water level is matched with the canal when it arrives, so hardly a drop is spilled. If you take a boat trip, you travel in the gondola itself. Afterwards, the visitor area is a good place to look back at the structure from a distance. A short trip away, the Kelpies, the giant horse-head sculptures completed in 2013 and opened to the public in April 2014, make a second very Falkirk landmark of canal-side engineering.
Myth versus reality
One common idea is that something so large must gobble electricity. In fact, the balance of the gondolas makes it astonishingly efficient. Another is that it is just a sculpture, or a tourist gimmick. It is a working piece of canal infrastructure that really does connect two waterways, and it is the only rotating boat lift of its kind in the world. And while it looks futuristic, it solves a very old problem: how to raise boats between two canals at different levels. It just does so in a far more dramatic way than a flight of locks.
Notable people
- Tony Kettle
- Queen Elizabeth II
- Archimedes
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The Kelpies
Published
Two 30-metre horse heads, each weighing about 300 tonnes, rise beside the M9 near Falkirk, and the real horses behind them were Clydesdales named Duke and Baron.