Tour De Forth: A journey along the River Forth from source to sea: Part One - Origin Stories

A few weeks later I decide to go and find out.

Where does a river begin? The River Forth flows for 29 miles from the Trossachs through Stirling and down the Forth Valley before widening out into an estuary at Kincardine and then on to Edinburgh and the sea.

Loch Ard marks the official start of the Forth (though Loch Ard itself is fed by water from Loch Chon so questions of origin can be liquid) and I’m looking for the place where loch becomes river. But to do that

I have to find the loch itself.

Truth is, I am hopeless outdoors. I can’t read maps, my sock keeps slipping below my heel in my walking boots and I think I might be lost. I am walking through denuded trees, past giant boulders and slate outcrops covered in soft moss.

The photographer Albert Watson once told me that Scotland had the best moss. He would travel from New York for fashion shoots just so he could use it as his backdrop.

As I walk I am thinking of all the rivers I’ve lived near. As a baby, in army barracks in Germany, I was close to the Ruhr. As a boy I could see the River Bann from the playground in Northern Ireland. My Uncle Tommy would take me and my sisters to the shop, buy sweets which we would eat while we walked by the river. One day walking home from work he took an epileptic fit, fell in and drowned. I have a vivid memory of my mother grieving and angry. “I hate that river,” she screamed again and again and again.

I’ve lived by the River Carron in Denny, by the River Wear in Durham. But mostly I have lived close to the Forth. Now when  I hear the word “river” I think of the suck of the marshy lands at low tide that stretch away either side of the Kincardine Bridge, the looping meanders of the river around Stirling, even the width of the water between the two Queensferrys.

But its beginning is eluding me. I climb up a hill through heather, birdsong and the plash of soft rain to try to get my bearings. But at the top the clouds meet the canopy and I can’t see anything.

This is getting ridiculous. How can you misplace a loch? I retrace my steps, go the other way, turn a corner and there is Loch Ard.

This morning it’s a place of silence and dripping rain. Sometimes Scotland, you are so beautiful. I walk along the bank trying to work out the point at which the loch ends and the river begins. There is a house called Lochend Cottage. That sounds hopeful. Behind it water tumbles over duck-covered stepping stones and under a wooden bridge. I walk over the latter. This must be the river’s first crossing, I think.

Back at the entrance to the cottage I feel that maybe I should check. I open the gate and knock on the door.

Susan Mitchell is in. She has lived here for the best part of four years. And yes, she says, the Forth starts in her back garden. “It literally starts in our boathouse.”

About three months ago, she says, she got a letter from an Australian couple addressed to the home owner, Lochend Cottage. The sender said his mother had been raised in the cottage and he asked if it would be OK to visit. “I had a lovely day with them showing them around. His mother had been born here in 1916. His mum had grown up at the source of the Forth.”

Outside, the river skips and dances away towards Aberfoyle.

On the Carse of Stirling, Brian Eno’s Another Green World on the car stereo and swimming in my head, I imagine I am driving along the bed of an ancient sea.

Some 8000 years ago or thereabouts the carse was covered in water, reaching as far as the Lake of Menteith, 12 miles west of Stirling. The first people of Scotland, TC Smout and Mhairi Stewart point out in their book The Firth of Forth: An Environmental History of the Forth, could have walked from the Atlantic, which then reached as far as Loch Lomond, to the North Sea in a “long morning’s walk”. The two bodies of water were then less than 10 miles apart.

This tidal lagoon offered rich pickings for the hunter gatherers of the Mesolithic era. Victorian engineers found the skeletons of 16 great whales lodged in the carse clays. The largest was 22m long, the remains of a blue whale found at Airthrey in 1819, with a discarded tool beside it.

Another was found as far west as Flanders. The bog – one of a number that used to cover the carse between Aberfoyle and Stirling – was born when the last ice age ended. The dips and bumps left behind by the retreating ice filled with vegetation. Sphagnum moss began to take root, which in turn created peat. The result, David Pickett, reserve manager with Scottish Natural Heritage, suggests, is a bit like a malfunctioning compost heap. “The plant material, instead of rotting and breaking down, is just pickled and preserved. And so it accumulates.”

Beneath the bog, though, lies the carse clay which is so good for agriculture. By the middle of the 18th century landowners were working hard to get at it.

Flanders Moss is almost half the size it was 300 years ago. Nearly 2000 acres were cleared in the 18th and 19th centuries. But it has survived rather better than other bogs in the area. Kincardine Moss was almost totally removed.

“There is probably no track of land of the same extent, equally unprofitable and useless, that has ever been rendered so productive and populous in any part of the three kingdoms,” the Old Statistical Account of 1799 said of the bog clearances.

Some of the clearance schemes were complex but on Flanders Moss it was simply a case of cutting the peat and removing it. “They used the Forth as a transport mechanism,” explains Pickett. “Huge areas of peat were just flushed down the Forth.” 

As late as the 1970s drains were installed on Flanders Moss in readiness to dig up peat. A conifer plantation had also been established.

“By the early 1990s this whole area was in a really poor state,” says Pickett. Scottish Natural Heritage stepped in, bought the peat planning permissions and started on a long process of trying to restore as much as possible of the bog to its pre-1750 state.

“Maybe five, 10 years down the line it will be a matter of stepping back and letting it get on with itself,” Pickett says. “The place will be getting wetter, the sphagnum moss will be holding more water and then it starts to function naturally. We’re almost giving it a jump start.”

We take a walk on the bog. At the moment heather covers much of it. Too much. But Pickett points out where the sphagnum moss is thriving. It is lurid green and wet, like a green Thai curry soup you’d pass up at a restaurant.

But it’s not all inedible. He points out a thread of greenery to me, follows it along and finds the fruit. Wild cranberry. “You can eat the berries, but they’re a bit sharp,” he admits.

What makes Flanders Moss special, Pickett explains, is that it provides a home to animals and invertebrates found in few other place. There’s a species of spider here – the bog sun jumper spider – that only exists in a handful of other places. It is home, too, to a cacophony of birds; Willow warblers, skylarks, reed buntings, stonechats and the aforementioned windchats. On a spring morning the air hums with birdsong, he says. It may not look it at first glance but the bog is alive.

Flanders Moss is also an ecological battery. Peat bogs retain water, vital in an area prone to flooding. More than that, the bog locks carbon in. It is doing its bit to fight climate change.

On the way home I find a wild cranberry berry in my pocket. The taste of it bursts in my mouth.

Behind Dobbie’s Garden Centre I meet Sandy and Crawford. They come here maybe two or three times a week to fish. The river is tidal up to Stirling but here the river looks sleepy, a brown broth of a thing. Good for sea trout and salmon, Sandy and Crawford say.

What they both love is just sitting by the water and watching what passes. “When you’re standing up to your thighs in cold running water you’re looking about and seeing things you wouldn’t see in the house,” says Crawford.

“There’s otter, there’s heron. Swans, cormorants, a couple of big ospreys sometimes.”

“There’s a kingfisher occasionally,” adds Sandy. “You just see it flying. Oh God, it goes at some speed. You just see a blue and orange flash.”

Mink too. Pelts black as night. “The first time I saw one I thought it was a cat,” Crawford says.

I am looking for the place where the Forth meets the River Teith, one of its major tributaries. Indeed, I had read that the Teith was the bigger river at this point. It looks much smaller to me. It takes me a moment to realise that I’ve got them the wrong way around.

It’s this section of the river I picture when I think of Iain Banks’s novel Whit. It was somewhere near here that Banks’s heroine Isis Whit climbs into a rubber coracle, before “floating and paddling down this virtually untravelled stretch of twisty, muddy old river”.

Twisty indeed. From here on “the Forth curves about like somebody’s thrown a bit of string down,” Crawford tells me, cutting around and about Stirling itself. At some point in the early 1990s I can remember climbing up to the castle esplanade to look down on the river swollen and breaching its banks. The loops of land within the meanders had been sealed off. They had been transformed into small islands. From the esplanade I could see woolly dots of white where sheep stood forlornly stranded.

Stirling is central to Scotland in terms of both geography and history. That’s partly down to the bogs like Flanders Moss that sucked up land to the west of the city. You couldn’t get an army through them and so kings and soldiers would head to where the Forth could be forded.

As Smout and Stewart point out, Mathew Paris’s 1250 English map of Scotland shows the country as “wasp-waisted, only Stirling Bridge joining the two halves”, with the Scotland north of the Forth described as Scocia Ultramarina (Scotland beyond the sea). Stirling’s importance as a meeting point was clear even when little else about Scotland might have been.

 As a result battle after battle was fought in and around the city. Writing about the martial history of the Forth Valley HM Caddell notes in his wonderfully opinionated 1913 geological survey, The Story of the Forth: “Famous in romance and history as the scene of many a bloody battle on land or sea, it remained a veritable valley of dry and broken battle on land and sea until 1746, when the Second Battle of Falkirk closed the long and sanguinary record.”

But the real reason I am inordinately fond of Stirling is because it is so central to my own story. The outlines of my adult life were sketched out in the city.

I came as a student in the early 1980s, met the woman who would become my wife. Here is where we got married, bought our first home. We lived a short walk from the bridge over the river. The Forth flowed through our lives largely unnoticed.

I remember one dreary Presbyterian Sunday – back when dreary Presbyterian Sundays were still a thing – I took a walk through Riverside and over the pedestrian bridge to Cambuskenneth. Returning the best part of 30 years later it still seems cut off and apart. I walk through a field full of cows to get to Cambuskenneth Abbey. Apart from a bell tower, there is only the stone foundations of the abbey dating to the 13th century.

Standing alone in the grounds is a stone memorial casket. Here lie the remains of James III. They are somewhere under a stone memorial paid for by Queen Victoria. There is nobody else here this afternoon paying any respects.

There is not much to see so I walk through a gate and down towards the river where, it is said, William Wallace once swam. There is a tower here too, little more than an angle of stone now. From the shadows near the top a raptor – a kestrel, I think – rises easily, languorously into the sky.

It is low tide and there is a shingle bank covered in resting birds. I am just a matter of miles (12 or so) from the Forth estuary. But, here, this afternoon the river has almost disappeared. What there is, I have to myself.

I get lost in Grangemouth trying to find the port. I often get lost in Grangemouth, but I have a reason this time. It turns out there is more than one port. I need to be at the one at the other end of town. I drive all the way back and turn left at the petro-chemical plant and then, having signed in, drive past containers and container carriers (cranes that look like container exo-skeletons) and dumpy bulbous tanks and over railway lines, all the way to the Forth.

We are nearer Fife than Falkirk, Alasdair Smith points out as he shakes hands. Longannet Power Station looms up close on the other shore.

Smith works for Forth Ports. A former merchant navy deck officer who manned cruise ships, he has returned home to take up the post of harbourmaster. That’s harbourmaster inner, he points out. “I look after the stretch of water from the Forth bridges upstream,” he explains.

“There is a harbourmaster outer who looks after everything from the bridges out to the edge of our area, which is at the entrance of the Forth. And that’s a line from North Berwick right across to Elie Ness.”

Born in Falkirk and raised in Edinburgh, Smith lives in Bo’ness. From his bedroom window he looks out on to his stretch of river.

“The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. Despite being all around the world I end up settling where my grandad used to work. He was a lock gateman. He worked on the old lock and retired in the late 1960s. Not a man I knew very well, but my family always say he would have been very proud to see me here.”

Smith is responsible for the traffic flow of everything that moves between the Clackmannanshire Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge, from the new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, the regular oil and gas tankers that call in at Ineos to private yachts and even smaller vessels. Buoys are his responsibility. People too.

“Whenever there’s a swimmer they have to give us a notification that has to be approved and notes to mariners have to go out.

“So it can be down to literally someone swimming in the water, up to the biggest warship the Royal Navy has ever had coming out, and we have to get involved.”

Traffic on the river is 24/7 every day of the year and the port at Grangemouth is responsible for all of it. Smith shows me the operations room where a duty harbourmaster and a vessel traffic officer are at work.

On a series of screens the Firth of Forth is laid out before us. The ships are a series of green blips and vectors recorded by radar and an automated identification system. The three bridges at Queensferry are each a shimmer of green cutting through the blackness of the digital river.

“It’s air traffic control at really slow speeds,” the vessel traffic officer Danny explains between talking to the ships. Out of the window the Sten Frigg from Gibraltar, a 144m-long chemical and oil products tanker, is making its way out of port. Oil and gas products make up a large part of the port of Grangemouth’s traffic but alcohol, potatoes, animal feed, timber, waste paper and recycled plastic bound for Scandinavia all come and go.

Some 50 per cent of Scotland’s GDP travels across the Forth and the Tay, Smith claims. His job is to make sure that all those ships, all that traffic is running smoothly.

“We are all about making sure that everything that moves out there happens safely and nothing blocks the next thing. You don’t want to have any groundings because it would be like a blockage, like a heart attack.

“It would stop everything.”

A couple of days later I am standing on the shore at Culross watching ships sail up the Forth to be met by tugs and guided into Grangemouth to load and unload. At Flanders Moss David Pickett had said that in the 18th century the River Forth was the liquid equivalent of the motorway. It remains so today.

In Culross I can smell the salt. The river has become estuary. Around the headland I can see the ribs of the new road bridge rising like sails into the sky. The current flows on.  I start to follow.

Next week: Listening to the Forth Rail Bridge and the Forth from the air and on the water.