At the tail-end of the 9.00 am news on BBC Radio 4 this morning, it was announced that visitors to the Kelpies in Falkirk would henceforth be able to enter the two sculptures, climb 100 feet to the top, and thus get a horse’s-eye view of Helix Park. It was perhaps an unusual item for the national news, but it just goes to show that the kelpies have a national, and even international reputation.
You see them to good advantage from the M9, situated at the confluence of the Carron River and the Forth and Clyde Canal, between Falkirk and Grangemouth, two enormous equine heads wrought in steel, one looking downwards in repose, the other keening to the sky. They are particularly impressive at night, when illuminated. They were conceived by the sculptor Andy Scott, designed on a pair of smaller models or maquettes, of scale 1:10, and constructed in 2013. It is said that they celebrate the role of horses in Scottish industry, pulling wagons, ploughs, barges, and coal ships. Apparently they celebrate two famous Clydesdales, Duke and Baron. But you might say that their precise location at this point on the Forth and Clyde Canal could represent the end of conventional horse-power and the dawning of the industrial revolution. It was here at the beginning of the nineteenth century that a prototype steamboat, the Charlotte Dundas, was successfully tested, hauling two 70 ton barges along a distance of 19 miles, against a headwind and at a speed of 1.9 mph. If you walk half a mile east from the kelpies along the canal towpath to the confluence with the Carron River, you can read, on various plaques as you go, all about the history surrounding these developments.
Some people are a bit snooty about the kelpies, rather, I fancy, the way people are snooty about the paintings of Jack Vettriano. They’re quite commonplace, don’t you know; hardly great art. They attract the undiscerning masses. Well, I’m one of the undiscerning masses. I visit quite often. I usually park by Falkirk football stadium, cross a busy road into Helix Park, and stroll by lovely marshland and waterways to the base of the enormous structures. There is a 10 kilometre circular walk you can do, from the kelpies to Rosebank distillery, thence to Falkirk Wheel, another inspiring feat of engineering that elevates barges between the Union Canal and the Forth & Clyde Canal. From there you walk to Callendar House, in Callendar Park, before returning to the kelpies in Helix Park.
A trip to Helix Park is a favourite outing for parents with young children, which is rather ironic considering the mythological provenance of the kelpie. It is a malignant water sprite, specifically inhabiting lochs in Scotland, most famously Loch Ness; but every sizeable loch in Scotland has its kelpie legend. The nearest one to me is the Lake of Menteith, the only “lake” in Scotland. The Lake of Menteith is the scene of a rather gruesome episode in Rob Roy, but the loch in The Lady of the Lake is I believe Loch Katrine.
He watched the wheeling eddies boil,
Till from their foam his dazzled eyes
Beheld the River Demon rise…
And in The Bride of Lammermoor, there is a treacherous quicksand named “Kelpie’s Flow”. Who knows, maybe the Loch Ness monster is a kelpie.
Kelpies drag humans, particularly children and young women, into the water, devour them, and cast their entrails up on to the water’s edge. They have the capacity to extend the length of their back, so as to accommodate several children at once. One child touched a kelpie and found he could not remove his hand as he was being dragged into the water. He only survived by cutting his own finger off. The name kelpie possibly comes from the Gaelic cailpeach, meaning a heifer or colt. It appears in the 1750s, spelled kaelpie, in an ode by William Collins. A kelpie is a shape-shifting sprite that can adopt human form, its hooves retained, but reversed in direction. Robert Burns may have had this in mind in his Address to the Deil of 1786.
When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord,
An float the inglin icy boord,
Then, water-kelpies haunt the foord,
By your direction,
An ‘nighted trav’llers are allur’d
To their destruction.
Parents used to warn children about kelpies, in order to keep them away from dangerous waterways. There is a sign on the edge of the Milngavie Reservoir just north of Glasgow – another popular haunt – stating rather sombrely, “Deaths have been known to occur in reservoirs”. Maybe it would be more effective if it said, “A kelpie lives here.” Kelpies can pose as handsome young men – a warning which, one way or another, continues to be impressed upon young ladies.
So maybe I should take pause before accepting the invitation to go inside a kelpie. You never know, I might find myself embroiled in a kind of reciprocal Trojan horse myth. The hazard is not an enemy egressing from within, rather a siren-like enticement to enter, and encounter who knows what?
jamescalumcampbell 