The Kelpies stand thirty metres above the Helix parkland, two horse heads in steel by Andy Scott, modelled on the water spirits of Scottish folklore that were said to change shape and drown the unwary. They are the largest equine sculptures in the world. Around them the Helix runs to a lagoon, cycle paths, play areas and a visitor centre, and you can walk the whole of it in an afternoon.
A few miles west is the other thing Falkirk is known for. The Falkirk Wheel is the only rotating boat lift of its kind anywhere. It opened in 2002 to reconnect the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal, which had been cut apart since the 1930s. The wheel is thirty-five metres across and raises boats twenty-four metres in a single slow turn; each caisson holds a quarter of a million litres and up to four canal boats. Trips run roughly hourly, and about 400,000 people come a year.
The canals it joins are half the reason to stay. The Forth and Clyde and the Union both run level through the area, and their towpaths make flat, easy walking and cycling. The John Muir Way, the coast-to-coast route from Helensburgh to Dunbar, picks up the Forth and Clyde and comes through Falkirk on its way east. Falkirk High station sits on the Glasgow–Edinburgh main line with trains about every fifteen minutes, which puts both cities within half an hour.
For something older, Rough Castle sits a couple of miles southeast near Bonnybridge. It is the best-preserved fort on the Antonine Wall, the turf rampart the Romans raised as the northern edge of their empire in the 140s AD. The ramparts are six metres thick, the defensive ditches survive, and in front of them are the lilia — rows of pits that once held sharpened stakes. The wall is a World Heritage Site, and it is free to walk.
In town, Callendar House is a French Renaissance pile wrapped around a fourteenth-century tower, set in a 500-acre park. Six centuries of guests passed through, Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie among them; inside are restored Georgian rooms and working period kitchens, and the surrounding wood holds the Forbes mausoleum.
The town's name comes from its church. Falkirk Old Parish Church is the speckled church — Faw Kirk — after the multi-coloured stones of the medieval building. William Adam, father of Robert, rebuilt the steeple between 1738 and 1741. In the churchyard lie two knights killed at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298, where Edward I defeated William Wallace: Sir John de Graeme, Wallace's friend, and Sir John Stewart of Bonkyll.
Falkirk was, in the eighteenth century, called the cradle of Scotland's Industrial Revolution. The Carron Iron Works cast James Watt's steam-engine beams in 1765, and Alfred Nobel later ran a detonator factory here, living at Hawthorn Cottage in Laurieston.
Before any of the iron, there was the Falkirk Tryst, one of the largest cattle markets in Scotland, which drew Highland drovers down to Stenhousemuir every August, September and October until the trade faded in the late nineteenth century. One man who saw it in 1849 called it "a scene to which Great Britain, perhaps even the whole world, does not afford a parallel."