What’s Happening on the Forth & Clyde Canal?

If you’ve been in the Camelon area of Falkirk recently, you’ll have a noticed a lot of activity – machinery, people in hi-viz, camera crews, and buckets (!) – along the canal. Our partners at the Forth Rivers Trust (through their commercial arm Forth Rivers Consulting) have been working in the dewatered canal between locks 15 and 11 to ‘rescue’ the fish swimming in that section of the canal. Working with our Senior Environmental Scientist Julia Johnstone and Senior Project Manager George McBurnie, they are preparing the canal for one of the biggest programme of engineering works in its history!

Why we are embarking on the engineering works

You can read more information about the full scope of works on the project page; but in a nutshell, many of the canal’s oak lock gates and supporting infrastructure need to be replaced or repaired. It is almost 25 years since the Millennium Link Project (£83.4 million) saved our Lowland canals from oblivion – turning them from a state of dereliction to a thriving blue-green corridor in our towns and major cities.

Just a few facts for you:

• The canals suffered a great deal of pollution during the boom in industry throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the re-opening of the canals, they have started to recover – the Forth & Clyde is now rated ‘Good’ for its ecological quality by SEPA.
• Since the canals re-opened, they have attracted more than £1.5 billion in investment into canalside communities. That’s in terms of infrastructure, places for tourism and leisure, local businesses, and housing on canalside land.
• The canals attract 20 million visitors and around 3,000 boats every year.

The works this year are vital to ensuring that the canals remain safe, open and navigable for generations to come. 

Crucially, the newly installed gates will be made of sustainably sourced hardwood, which will have a much longer lifetime than the current oak gates (30-40 years versus the 25-year standard for oak). That means it will be a long time before there is construction work of this scale on the canal again!

How will the works impact people and wildlife?

The works will continue up to March 2026. Our contractor Mackenzie Construction Ltd will be based at a site compound at Lock 16 (in the car park of the Union Inn, which is set to undergo refurbishment for a future re-opening).

There will be site machinery, cranes, and construction vehicles passing through the area and parked around the compound. In mid to late April, we will need to close the road over lock 16 where we are installing pipework for a lock bypass. We are in discussions with Falkirk Council about a diversion route, and Mackenzie Construction will provide maps, signposting and dates as soon as all is confirmed.

There will be minimal impact on wildlife from the works as they are able to migrate along the canal’s 35-mile length and stay away from the dewatered sections. This week’s fish rescue was vital to ensure fish do not become trapped in dewatered sections of the canal. It involved four key steps:

1. The canal’s water is lowered in one section to leave just a small channel in the centre of the mud and silt. That operation is conducted by our water controls team, who constantly measure and adjust the levels of the canal to ensure they remain safe.
2. The team at Forth Rivers Trust then don waders and enter the canal wearing tanks on their backs. While many of the fish move out of the basin downstream as the water drains away, some prefer to stay behind which need to be moved from harm. Using a mild electrical current to slow the fish down, they attract the fish making it easy to net them. With the fish captured, they then transfer them into the tanks and buckets.
3. The next step is to measure and document the fish species so that we can use the opportunity to understand more about them. In one day of the fish rescue between locks 16 and 15, the team caught almost 500 fish! Perch and pike are plentiful, and it has been a particularly good year for eels, including silver eels!
4. Finally, the fish are released further up the canal above the works where they can swim freely away.

You may also notice silver tape along the canal banks. This is to prevent birds from nesting in areas where they would be disrupted, encouraging them to safer parts of the canal and adjacent land.

More Information

You can find out more about road and towpath diversions associated with the works on our Ongoing Works pages. If you have questions for us, please contact: enquiries@scottishcanals.co.uk, 0141 332 6936 (Mon to Thu, 8.30am-5pm, Fri 8.30am - 4.30pm). 

On behalf of the team at Scottish Canals, Mackenzie Construction and Forth Rivers Trust, we’d like to express our gratitude to the people of Camelon and Tamfourhill who have been so supportive of our work.