New Scotland canal honours the Queen

Published: Friday, 07 July 2017

A NEW canal section forming the eastern gateway to Scotland’s Forth & Clyde Canal has been given a royal seal of approval after being officially named in honour of the Queen.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh boarded the Seagull Trust barge the Wooden Spoon Seagul and led a small flotilla along Scotland’s newest canal section, built as part of the £43m Helix project which features the Kelpies sculptures, before unveiling a plaque officially naming the new section the Queen Elizabeth II Canal, Alan Tilbury reports.

QE11 CanalMost complex section of waterway

The Queen Elizabeth II Canal forms the eastern gateway to the Forth & Clyde Canal, and is one of the most complex sections of waterway ever constructed in Scotland, the Queen Elizabeth II Canal passes underneath two major trunk roads and across utility pipelines, requiring innovative engineering solutions from a UK-wide team of experts.

The Queen Elizabeth II Canal is the final piece of the Millennium Link—an £83.5 million project that restored the nation’s inland waterways to a navigable state for the first time in more than 50 years and saw the construction of the iconic Falkirk Wheel.

Tribute to industrial past

Andrew Thin, Chairman of Scottish Canals, atated:

“The Kelpies and the Queen Elizabeth II Canal are helping put Falkirk and Grangemouth on tourists’ ‘to-see’ lists the world over and serve as a towering tribute to the industrial past of the area and a symbol of its bright future. We’d like to offer a huge thank you to everyone who has visited the new canal by boot, boat or bike since its completion and look forward to welcoming even more visitors in the years to come.”