John o'Groats to Land's End 2013: Day 14 – Twechar to Linlithcow

After a huge breakfast at the Twechar Farm B&B this morning we packed up ready for what seemed like an easy day on paper. 25 Miles of canal walking to a touristy destination that was bound to be full of B&Bs’ with a campsite as a fall-back option, what could be easier? As we left, the lady from the B&B handed us a donation for Help for Heroes which was very nice of her, I made a mental note to add her donation on-line and send her a link to the Just Giving site so that she could read up on our journey.

The day turned out to be a bit of a long trudge in the end. Canal walking, although flat, is pretty dull and meanders along the contour, so is never very direct. Combined with the rough gravel surface, meaning that every stone is felt right through your boots, this wasn’t really as pleasant as we had hoped. Still, we plodded away and at the half-way point we reached the Falkirk Wheel. The locals are rightly very proud of this 2002 engineering project which uses the Archimedes principle to provide a perfectly balanced mechanism for lifting barges up the 24 Metre ascent onto the Union Canal. We stopped for a coffee and watched whilst tourist boats made the “Falkirk Wheel Experience” up and down the canal. Sadly the waterways don’t seem to be used for much else these days.

It was a good job we stopped for coffee here as checking the map we realised that this was the point where we switched from the Forth and Clyde Canal onto the Union Canal. If we had missed this then we would have headed on north of Falkirk blindly following the wrong canal.

Eventually, with very sore feet, we reached the pretty town of Linlithgow. Linlithgow has a picturesque palace that sits on the shores of a Loch that I am sure would be nice to visit, but all we needed was accommodation. Unfortunately, both the big hotels in town were closed and the few B&Bs’ were all full, so we no option but to check into the local campsite which was pretty much at the bottom of the scale as far as campsites go. We just about found a place in between some disused caravans and decided to retire to the local pub to watch Andy Murray in the Wimbledon semi-finals. The pub was friendly and the locals were interested in our journey and bought us a whisky to reward our efforts as we watched Murray power through to the final. Eventually, we made our way back to the campsite, contemplating another long day ahead of us tomorrow.