And I have another gripe. The money they could have saved by not having the useless Magimix blades, they could have spent making something of the canal tunnel entrance beneath the Antonine Wall. This tunnel is as cheap as cheap could be, lined in sprayed concrete. Fine: unfortunately they have used the same pale sprayed concrete to make a horribly clumsy portal. Doesn’t the Antonine Wall, let alone the extraordinary lofty and prominent position of the tunnel mouth, deserve something a bit better than this?

The view from the tunnel out along the aqueduct to the Ochils is however glorious. I resent the functional dishonesty of the concrete aqueduct structure - it is designed to look as if it is clasped by a series of hoops, but this is more visual trickery, since the tops of the hoops are metal embellishments, serving no structural purpose. Never mind: they serve to frame the view very satisfactorily, and I’ll concede that the Wheel would be the poorer without them. Let them stay. Indeed, if you removed the wretched blades on the rotating boat lift, the whole composition would make much more sense visually, since the circular ends of the huge beams, in which the boat tanks counter-rotate in order to stay level, would then chime in exactly with the circular theme set up by the aqueduct hoops.