The skeptics amongst you might initially think that this bizarre twisted lake isn’t natural real, but rather that the Google engineers have just discovered Photoshop’s Twirl feature. However I assure you that it is real, as it’s only a few minutes down the road from where I work!

This is actually a sculpture, “Landform” by Charles Jencks – an immaculately sculpted earth, grass and water monument in the grounds of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. The artist describes it as being “based on a strange attractor and the flow of earth and traffic”.

The best thing about Landform though, is that you can wander around all over it, as several people can be seen doing on the day this image was taken.

Read more about Charles Jencks and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art at Wikipedia.

Thanks to Fred B.

Built on the site of the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival, the Glasgow Science Centre is a purpose-built facility featuring three floors dedicated to hands-on science in action. Taking the form of a huge, gleaming, titanium crescent overlooking the Clyde, the building is also home to the best-equipped planetarium in the UK.

As if that wasn’t enough, just to the south we can see the silver dome of Scotland’s only IMAX cinema¹, which has a screen larger than a 5-a-side football pitch, and a 12,000-watt digital sound system.

Most impressive of all from up here however, is the 127 metre-tall Glasgow Tower. This is the tallest floored building in Scotland, and the tallest building in the world which can rotate through a full 360 degrees!

Technically the tower is actually an aerofoil (like an aeroplane wing stood on one end), which is rotated into the wind by computers – allowing it to be exceptionally slim for its height. Impressive stuff, and I hear the views are not bad too.

Thanks to Martin Deutsch. More about the Glasgow Science Centre, the Glasgow Tower and the IMAX film format at, you guessed it, Wikipedia.

Today we’re posting a roundup of the most interesting ways Europe has employed to get canal barges up-and-over stuff. The simplest method is of course a bridge, of which you can see several excellent examples in our previous post, A Canal Across Germany. However sometimes barges need to traverse obstacles that a bridge cannot cross, and Europeland has employed several ingenious solutions to particular geographic problems.

Between Saint-Louis and Arzviller in France, a system was required that enabled the canal to cross the Vosges Mountains. The solution is the Saint-Louis-Arzviller inclined plane, a single structure that replaced 17 locks upon its completion in 1969.

Basically, vessels float into a gigantic bathtub which is then hauled up a 108.7 metre-long ramp at 41°. This vertical change of 44.6 m used to take 8 to 13 hours to traverse, but can now be achieved in just 4 minutes.

Such canal inclined planes are actually not uncommon, but the Saint-Louis-Arzviller example is probably the steepest. In Belgium, engineers have a more traditionally modest angle, but over a much greater distance – the Ronquières inclined plane climbs 68 m vertically, but is nearly 1.5 kilometres long! This time there are two giant bathtubs (actually known as caissons), and the journey takes a much more leisurely 45 minutes to complete.

Seemingly on a roll, Belgian engineers are also responsible for the Strépy-Thieu boat lift – an absolutely monumental machine that dispenses entirely with inclines, and just lifts the barges straight up and down in two counterbalanced caissons¹. The difference between water levels is 73.2 metres, meaning this is officially the world’s tallest boat lift. At least until the new one at the Three Gorges dam is finished anyway…

We already posted the world’s steepest flight of locks, the Caen Hill Flight, so instead here’s the Foxton Locks – a set of ten canal locks consisting of two “staircases” each of five locks. Because the Foxton locks can hold many boats at once, they’ve become a very popular location for Gongoozling – the art of watching activity on UK canals. No, seriously – there’s a Wikipedia page on Gongoozlers and everything.

The best thing about the Foxton locks however, is that we can actually see a barge in one of the locks.

The UK also has two working boat lifts – the Anderton Boat Lift in Cheshire, England, and the awesome Falkirk Wheel in Scotland (which is unfortunately not available on Google Earth or Maps, but Microsoft’s Live Local has a good image of it²).

Although both rely on Archimedes’ Principle, the Falkirk wheel is unique as it is the only rotating boat lift in the world. Barges enter the wheel at the ends of two opposing 15 metre arms, which then rotate through 180° in five and a half minutes, using only the energy it takes to boil 8 kettles!

Read more at Wikipedia about the Saint-Louis-Arzviller inclined plane, the Ronquières inclined plane, the Strépy-Thieu boat lift, the Foxton Locks, the Anderton Boat Lift, and the Falkirk Wheel.

Or, if you’re really interested, “Canal lifts and inclines of the world” by Hans-Joachim Uhlemann seems to be definitive book on this subject.

Thanks to Jel and others.

The Act of Union, passed in 1707, created a political union between the Kingdoms of Scotland and England, meaning that Scotland was directly governed from London for 292 years. In 1997 a referendum of the Scottish people approved the re-establishment of a directly-elected Scottish Parliament. Matters such as education, health and prisons, which used to be dealt with by the Parliament at Westminster, are now decided in Scotland.

The first elections to the Scottish Parliament were held in 1999, the same year that construction began on the building that would be the parliament’s future home.

Designed by the late Enric Miralles, the Parliamentary complex is actually a campus of several buildings, reflecting different architectural styles, with a total floor area of 31,000 square metres.

From this aerial vantage point we can clearly see some of the more striking features of the buildings, such as the 30-metre-long elliptical debating chamber (which contains no supporting columns thanks to a roof fabricated in part by Scottish oil industry welders), as well as the stunning leaf-shaped roof-lights on the Garden lobby and their supporting internal structural lattice of solid oak struts.

As well as being a strikingly adventurous government building, the Parliament also sets new standards in environmental sustainability. A minimum of 80% of the electricity purchased for the building is required to come from renewable sources, and from above we can clearly see the solar panels set into the roof of the Canongate building. These solar panels are used for heating water in the complex, of course this can lead to overheating in the summer, so the building employs a computerised management system which senses the temperature in different parts of the Parliament, and automatically opens windows to keep the building cool.

The Scottish Parliament Building is open to visitors all year round, and you can read more about its often highly controversial history at WIkipedia.

There are 21 cities worldwide that have at sometime been nick-named “Athens of the (something)“. However, two of these cities have taken the name even further and built replicas of Athens’ most famous landmark, the Parthenon.

Nashville, Tennessee acquired the nickname “Athens of the South” in the 1850s by the creation of numerous universities and colleges and being the first southern US city to establish a public school system.

So as the centrepiece of the 1897 World’s Fair, Nashville built the World’s only complete, full scale replica of the Parthenon. The building was originally a temporary structure but they liked it so much it was re-built on proper foundations in the 1920s.

Today the Parthenon serves as an art museum and even features plaster-casts of marble sculptures which adorned the original Parthenon (which are presently held in the British Museum).

In the late 1700s many of Edinburgh, Scotland’s public buildings were built in the Greek neo-classical style, giving rise to the nickname “Athens of the North”.

Then, in 1882, construction began on a Parthenon replica named The National Monument as a memorial to those who died in the Napoleonic Wars. You can clearly see that the structure is only half completed, perhaps due to lack of funding, but some say it was an intentional design.

In stark contrast to public feelings of Nashville’s replica, the locals of Edinburgh generally dislike the Parthenon and it has often been described as “Edinburgh’s Disgrace”.

Previously on Google Sightseeing: Ancient Greece.

Wikipedia Links: Parthenon, Nashville and the National Monument, Edinburgh.

Thanks: Taylor Nelson & James Turnbull