Bo'ness

The Corbie Inn and the coast-to-coast way

The Corbie Inn on Corbiehall keeps an official stamp behind the bar, and if you are walking the John Muir Way you get your passport marked here as you pass through. It is a traditional pub with a restaurant and function suite, and the drinks list is longer than the town's size would lead you to expect: real ales and cask beers, more than sixty blended and malt whiskies, and over eighty gins. The kitchen does home-cooked meals to eat in or take away, and the takeaway pizza has its local admirers. On Fridays and Saturdays it runs from noon until eleven.

That John Muir Way is the reason a lot of people find themselves in Bo'ness at all. The coast-to-coast national trail crosses Scotland from Helensburgh to Dunbar, 134 miles of it, and the stretch through here runs along the south bank of the Firth of Forth. Walk west and it takes you toward Falkirk and the Falkirk Wheel; walk east and you reach Blackness Castle, then Linlithgow and South Queensferry. The town itself climbs steeply from the water, terraced with Victorian housing that looks north over the Forth toward the Grangemouth petrochemical works, which are hard to miss and, at night, harder still.

Food and the restored waterfront

For food beyond the pub there is Bo'ness Spice, an Indian restaurant in the town centre, and a fish and chip shop on the high street. The waterfront has been restored for walking, and the harbour and foreshore give you the Forth on one side and, on the former colliery ground at Kinneil, a nature reserve on the other.

Watt and the Roman frontier

Kinneil is where the town's history gets serious. In 1769 Dr John Roebuck leased Kinneil House and paid for James Watt to develop his improved steam engine in a cottage on the estate. The cottage and a Newcomen engine cylinder are still there, on parkland that also holds a fortlet on the Antonine Wall. Bo'ness marks the eastern end of that wall, the Roman frontier that ran clear across to Old Kilpatrick, and a replica of the Bridgeness Slab — carved with a sacrifice of pig, sheep and bull, the original now in Edinburgh — stands in Kinningars Park.

Cinema, coal and railway legacies

The industry that built the place has mostly gone. Coal was shipped from here in 1548 to supply Edinburgh Castle; the colliery employed more than 1,200 men before it closed in 1982. A shipbreaking yard scrapped ocean liners and warships until around 1970. What survives is worth an afternoon. The Hippodrome, a circular building of 1911 by the local architect Matthew Steele, is Scotland's oldest purpose-built cinema and still shows films, including a silent-film festival each year. The Bo'ness and Kinneil Railway runs steam and diesel trains over five miles of track and keeps the Museum of Scottish Railways beside its station.

Arriving and looking ahead

Bo'ness has no railway station of its own; Linlithgow, two miles south on the Edinburgh–Glasgow line, is the nearest, and the M9 is close. Undiscovered Scotland describes "a strong sense of a town that is turning a corner," and standing on the restored foreshore, watching a heritage train pull out along the water, you can see what they mean.