A man, a plan, a canal
Hic sunt canales. Straight paths and slight bends, bridges over water, the hiss of the M8 motorway, stone waymarkers, decay on the fringes, a yellowhammer in winter branches. Forgive the dog Latin. This is the wave of translation.
![](https://i.ibb.co/0QkL3qX/amanaplan1.jpg)
An index of the ordinary, with too many entries to keep in my head till the return home. Yet I don’t stop walking to take out my notebook and write; I don’t record any voice memos to remind myself of what I’ve just seen: “Brian, remember not to forget to mention the eerie, abandoned landing area in front of the big house.”.
![](https://i.ibb.co/wNCDdx9/amanaplan2.jpg)
. . . or . . .
“Brian, remember not to forget to record that feeling of intense vertigo on the Scott Russell Aqueduct.”
The A720, the infamous Edinburgh City Bypass, grumbles below.
![](https://i.ibb.co/t8n5pbf/amanaplan3.jpg)
. . . or . . .
“Brian, remember not to forget to find out who Scott Russell actually was.”.
![](https://i.ibb.co/T2Rx4yC/amanaplan4.jpg)
The photographs help (I took over a hundred shots), but looking back I’m on a different outing, or I was. The actual and the remembered rendered as a synthesised whole, not quite real but not entirely imagined. It’s always this way. After I stop walking, the walk continues, in my head and on the page.
![](https://i.ibb.co/4prwrgh/amanaplan5.jpg)
![](https://i.ibb.co/D5pJvDK/amanaplan6.jpg)
25½ 6
or
even
those who
stumble
move
forward.
The bridges create a kind of rhythm, a pulse along the waterway. The ducks’ periodic dives beneath the waves are jazzy drum-fills. Union Canal blueskyblues.
![](https://i.ibb.co/fMMYsr0/amanaplan7.jpg)
And there’s always the giddy anticipation of a cyclist’s bell as you round the lip of each underbridge where the path is at its most narrow. Some say hello, others say thank you as I step aside, some don’t acknowledge I exist beyond ringing the bell. On the imagined walk, I erase them all.
![](https://i.ibb.co/5xbG0Nr/amanaplan8.jpg)
As always, there are curiosities along the way, small surprises.
![](https://i.ibb.co/qJ9NZz1/amanaplan9.jpg)
Alas, the travails of the graffiti artist, what suffering they bear with such noble grace.
![](https://i.ibb.co/WzfSY3j/amanaplan10.jpg)
Where there’s water, there’s rust, unsleeping.
![](https://i.ibb.co/KFnqmK0/amanaplan11.jpg)
And the colours. Those colours.
![](https://i.ibb.co/k1FHTBH/amanaplan12.jpg)
![](https://i.ibb.co/pZBb2Pp/amanaplan13.jpg)
![](https://i.ibb.co/SJ3Nz6d/amanaplan14.jpg)
Even the numbers have a certain poetry, their significance unimportant. A countdown or a reckoning? It probably doesn’t matter at this point.
![](https://i.ibb.co/SyZ39TD/amanaplan15.jpg)
![](https://i.ibb.co/nRKcNHR/amanaplan16.jpg)
![](https://i.ibb.co/mhVbW99/amanaplan17.jpg)
![](https://i.ibb.co/SBm3RkM/amanaplan18.jpg)
And I only walk so far before I have to retrace my steps, back along the same path I’ve already tramped. A palindrome with creased edges. This loop is linear, a flat circle. But I do at least learn later about John Scott Russell, the nineteenth century Scottish civil engineer and shipbuilder, and and his work on the solitary wave phenomenon.
![](https://i.ibb.co/wy3Xfv5/amanaplan19.jpg)
This is Bridge 11, the unassuming spot where Scott Russell discovered the soliton wave in 1834.
![](https://i.ibb.co/pysBb6c/amanaplan20.jpg)
I'll leave you with his own words, the significance of which seems fitting for this walk that continued after I had finished it and the exact nature of which I "lost ... in the windings of the channel."
I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped—not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which continued its course along the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed. I followed it on horseback, and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour, preserving its original figure some thirty feet long and a foot to a foot and a half in height. Its height gradually diminished, and after a chase of one or two miles I lost it in the windings of the channel. Such, in the month of August 1834, was my first chance interview with that singular and beautiful phenomenon which I have called the Wave of Translation.
Russell, J. Scott (1845). "Report on Waves" [Report of the fourteenth meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, York, September 1844] (PDF). London: John Murray. 311–390, Plates XLVII–LVII.