Detail of inscribed base plate in front of customs house. Digital image of E/6481/CN.
SC 681710
Description Detail of inscribed base plate in front of customs house. Digital image of E/6481/CN.
Date 18/9/2001
Collection Records of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), Edinbu
Catalogue Number SC 681710
Category On-line Digital Images
Copy of E 6481 CN
Scope and Content Railway base plate, Canal House Basin, Bowling Basin, Forth & Clyde Canal, West Dunbartonshire This shows a railway base plate and a white-painted mooring hook at the Canal House Basin which was built 1790. Metal rivets secure the metal plate onto a cope of the basin wall and the inscription 'L & D RY' stands for the Lanarkshire & Dunbartonshire Railway. This base is one of a pair at each side of the railway track in front of the Custom House. The plates may have been the base for a crane or the foundation for a turntable that would have turned wagons and tipped their contents into a barge. 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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