View from south west

Description View from south west

Date 18/9/2001

Collection Records of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), Edinbu

Catalogue Number E 6449 CN

Category Photographs and Off-line Digital Images

Copies SC 681716

Scope and Content Customs House, Bowling Harbour, Forth & Clyde Canal, West Dunbartonshire, from south-west This shows the Customs House which was built around 1800 and is situated to the east of Bowling Harbour. The two-storeyed, basement and attic building has a three-storeyed extension to the rear and is plastered and painted. There are ashlar margins around the windows, quoins (corner stones) and bands between the storeys. The boats in the foreground are docked in the Canal House Basin and part of a railway viaduct is shown on the left with part of the railway swing bridge over the canal on the right. The Customs House was originally the office where duty to the Crown would be paid on goods arriving on boats at Bowling Harbour from overseas. This building continued to operate as an office when the canal closed as the harbour and the two canal basins remained open to pleasure and working boats. British Waterways Scotland now occupy the building. The Forth & Clyde Canal was built between 1768 and 1790. It could have been completed sooner but funds ran out in 1777 and more money was not found by the government until 1784. John Smeaton (1724-92) was the designer and first chief engineer for the project. He was replaced in 1777 by Robert Mackell (d.1779), and in 1785 Robert Whitworth (1734-99) took over the building of the final section of the canal from Glasgow. When the canal was completed in 1790 it ran from the River Forth at Grangemouth, in the east, to Bowling on the River Clyde in the west of Scotland. The canal was linked to Edinburgh when the Union Canal was opened in 1822. The Forth & Clyde Canal was closed in 1963 and the Union Canal in 1965 and the construction of new roads meant that it was impossible for boats to travel along the full length of these watercourses. However, the £84.5m Millennium Link project enabled the canals to reopen in 2002. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

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