By the time I headed over there on the last evening of the festival, I had witnessed the results of this international cross-pollination in other corners of Boston; the traffic cones on top of sculptures, the spontaneous marches. Every hour on social media seemed to present new glimpses of merriment, like a man descending the so-called cop slide by City Hall while playing the bagpipes. “You know,” a friend said, turning to me as we walked toward cheers echoing from The Haven. “I don’t think I can remember a time when Boston felt this fun.” But when the Tartan Army went south to Miami for the match with Brazil, I started to wonder: How do we keep the good vibes going when the Scots have left?
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When the World Cup watch parties ended and the temporary open container zones were scaled back, would Boston revert to its sleepier self again? I wanted to believe we had just been through a Mary Poppins experience that would leave a lasting impact, but I could already feel the city simmering down. So, on a wicked muggy night that had most of Boston sequestered inside with AC, I started to think about following the Tartan Army to Scotland.
Scotland’s two major port cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh, are connected by a pair of waterways with footpaths: the Union Canal and the Forth and Clyde Canal. Following these paths from one city to the other makes for a mostly flat, 57-mile journey. Having already spent a bit of time in Edinburgh sampling whiskeys and climbing the craggy hill called Arthur’s Seat, I fancied the idea of spending a few days walking the canals to Glasgow, Boston’s new sister city.
Testing the waters on X, I posted that I was “Thinking of going to Scotland and walking from Edinburgh to Glasgow.” Within 24 hours, I had an inbox full of messages from Scots, including a written rendition of “We’ll Be Coming” — a sports anthem for the Tartan Army — with one notable amendment.
He’ll be coming,
He’ll be coming, He’ll be coming down the road, When you hear the noise of the Boston boy,
He’ll be coming down the road.
I started packing the next morning.
The Union Canal begins near the castles and museums of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, in a neighborhood called Fountainbridge. It was improbably sunny when I arrived there with a stuffed hiking backpack and some scones from a nearby Marks & Spencer.
That old axiom you often hear in New England — to wait five minutes if you don’t like the weather — might well have been imported from Scotland, where you can experience rain, fog, and thunderous winds, and still end the day with a sunburn. I wanted to make the most of the morning rays and get sauntering.
I set off along the cobblestones for a little town called Broxburn, following a school of teenage kayakers through the immersive vegetation and wildflowers that grew on both sides of the canal, as the sounds of Edinburgh faded away. Scotland’s relentless precipitation yields abundant greenery. Even in a major city such as Edinburgh, you’re never that far from a thicket of ash trees or a patch of stinging nettle.
As I ambled beyond Edinburgh’s city limits, the towpath squiggled onward. Spur paths led into backyards, quiet streets, and, in one town called Ratho, a charming inn where I enjoyed a golden Innis & Gunn lager on a deck perched above the canal. Public walking ways in Scotland can feel like arteries, connecting people and places, ultimately keeping everything alive.
The start of the Union Canal at Lochrin Basin, very close to central Edinburgh.Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/for the Boston GLobe
After emerging from the shadowy woods of Ratho and crossing high above a forest on the towering Almond Aqueduct, I found myself in more prolonged sunlight as the scenery transitioned to farmland. Some fields were dotted with sheep. Others contained burly hay bales. One of Scotland’s foundational crops is cereal oat, and shortly after arriving in Broxburn — where I climbed stone stairs from the canal to the town center — I got to experience this at a bakery called Nikki’s Bakehouse. The “gypsy cream” that I sprang for, essentially a golden whoopie pie, featured maple-infused oatcakes. According to the cashier, I was the third American who had popped in that week.
The next morning, after a surprisingly restful night above a pub at the Oatridge Hotel, I hopped back onto the canal towpath and followed it past an enormous pink shale mound called Greendykes Bing. The sun made the shale colors pop and my skin crackle, and I was relieved to see some ominous-looking clouds approaching from the west. But before they arrived to snuff out the sun, the pathway took me into one of the thickest woodlands I had seen yet. It turned out to be a ferny gateway to Winchburgh, where a marina full of narrowboats and a tiny coffee stand called The Wee Bothy lured me away from the towpath.
I was smitten with the hobbity hut, with its open doors, tiny kitchen, and shades of blue. As the owner, Irene Mahoney, made me a bacon toastie, she told me she had run a restaurant, but when the grind collided with the realities of aging, she decided to semi-retire by downsizing to a waterside hut. Already, her fans were queuing up, including a French bulldog angling for a biscuit. While the bacon toastie was a savory winner, brightened up with tiny pickles, it almost felt more like having dessert — a final course, after a nourishing meal.
As I followed the canal to the village of Linlithgow through another open stretch of countryside, a voice from the water called, “Where you going?” I turned and saw two young women kneeling on a paddleboard in the canal. The one who had called out was Ruby Thompson. She was from Ireland visiting her friend and fellow paddler, Isla, and she had seen my backpack and rain gear, taking me for a local. (Flattering!) A towpath-to-waterway conversation began.
Scenes from the author’s walk from Edinburgh to Glasgow, including a “gypsy cream” at Nikki’s Bakehouse (top row left), Mark Palmer (center) at The Kelpies visitor center cafe, a friendly flag (bottom row center) on the Forth and Clyde Canal near Banknock, and a victory dinner of steak-and-sausage pie (bottom right) at Drygate Brewing in Glasgow.Photographs by Miles Howard; Globe staff illustration
It reminded me of how the Tartan Army had swept so many Bostonians into their ranks during the World Cup, through a warm greeting on the street or gallows banter in the long line for a bar. Somehow, they had gotten into the same gregarious headspace as Thompson.
But that wasn’t necessarily a reflection of how Scots carry themselves at home. In the city of Falkirk, my destination for Day Two, I hopped on a bus for an “off-trail” detour to a pair of gargantuan horse sculptures known as The Kelpies — a tribute to the horses that powered Scotland’s farms and dragged those barges along the canals — and that’s where I linked up with Mark Palmer, a sports journalist for The Times of London I had met in Boston when he was covering the World Cup. I was curious to hear his thoughts on the social climate in Scotland when there are no games looming.
“Scotland is not necessarily a joyous nation,” Palmer said. “There’s a tendency here to look on the negative without imagining what the positive could be.”
“That sounds familiar,” I said. “When it’s just us, people in New England can be stodgier and more withdrawn. What do you think made the opposite possible in Boston? All that shared joy?”
The writer took a detour off his walking route in Falkirk to see The Kelpies, a pair of gargantuan horse sculptures. Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/for the Boston GLobe
“Inordinate amounts of alcohol, for one,” Palmer said with a chuckle. “But, without wishing to butter up you guy, it does need a receptive host. . . . I kept waiting for that moment where people would think, Actually, we now need to push back against this disruption; trying to get to your subway stop and there’s a queue of 10,000 kilts. But that moment never arrived.”
Later that night, at a pub in Falkirk called Cheerz Bar, the bartender commented on my Buc-ee’s cap — “Are their bathroom really the cleanest in America?” — and soon I was giving him updates on how many statues in Boston still had traffic cones atop their heads.
The writer passes by The Falkirk Wheel. Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/for the Boston GLobe
I spent the next day segueing from the end of the Union Canal to the start of the Forth and Clyde Canal, which continues to Glasgow. Boats are raised and lowered between the two waterways with an eye-popping Ferris wheel-like contraption called The Falkirk Wheel, and after watching this with a small crowd of tourists, I pressed on westward through rustling bushes and warm rain.
The Forth and Clyde Canal was vaster and more exposed to the sun than its Edinburgh-bound counterpart, but still buffered by flowers, shrubs, and little groves of shade trees as I followed its bends past several sets of locks. What felt different here was the social atmosphere, with passing cyclists and walkers. Greetings had been rare on the Union Canal, where each of us seemed happily lost in our own little world, but as I approached the Glasgow metro area, nearly every fellow traveler offered a “Hello!” or, if I stood aside to let a bike pass, a “Cheers!” I had heard about the gregariousness of Glaswegians. Perhaps it was fitting for a city that’s long been an immigration hub, where a constant flow of newcomers is part of daily life.
The author walks along the Forth and Clyde Canal heading to Glasgow. Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu, initiated a sister city agreement with Glasgow during the World Cup. Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/for the Boston GLobe
On the final morning of the walk, powered by a traditional Scottish breakfast that included poached eggs, rasher bacon, haggis, a potato scone, and other savory carbs, I set off from the suburb of Kilsyth to Glasgow’s city center under sunny skies. The transition to the urban core was foreshadowed by electrical towers and distant high-rise apartment buildings peeking over the greenery.
For my endpoint, I had chosen Glasgow’s Duke of Wellington statue, where the tradition of adorning statues with traffic cones was born in the 1980s — most likely at the hands of revelers staggering home from a pub. In the heart of the city, where gleaming towers collide with Victorian stone and spires, he appeared from behind a row of scaffolding like a creature from my dreams. The duke was sporting four cones, stacked atop his head, and someone had even put a cone on the horse, turning it into a unicorn.
The duke may have been the finish line for my walk, but I wasn’t ready to put my feet up just yet. The real finale was a conversation with a living, breathing Tartan Army veteran.
In late July, the famous Duke of Wellington statue in Glasgow was adorned with the traditional cones on its head. The Boston traffic cone sat atop the horse’s head.
Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/for the Boston GLobe
His name was Simon Gibson, a surgeon who practices at a hospital on the west side of town, and I found him at a cafe steps away from a bridge across the River Clyde — Glasgow’s central waterway after which the Forth and Clyde Canal is named. Not only did Gibson join the Tartan Army for the second game in Boston, but he brought his wife and two kids along.
“Everyone was so friendly, especially if they heard your accent, from the taxi driver at the airport to people we met on public transit,” Gibson said as we sipped our Americanos. “It got to the point where we wouldn’t go out without Scotland gear on, because it made you feel like a celebrity.”
It was impossible for us to avoid the reality that this mutual infatuation between Scotland and Boston had taken place during a period of historic geopolitical hostility and tension. Boston “reminded us of the good in America, and hopefully reminded parts of America of the good that comes with collaboration, rather than being insular,” Gibson reflected.
When Simon Gibson was in Boston with his family to see Scotland play in the World Cup, he said, “It got to the point where we wouldn’t go out without Scotland gear on, because it made you feel like a celebrity.”Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/for the Boston GLobe
As we said goodbye, I caught a bus for my hotel, craving a hefty steak-and-sausage pie and grateful for yet another glimpse of a desire that millions of us share — a human need to connect that transcends borders. The World Cup revelry in Boston was a reminder of these intertwined roots that make it possible for us to coalesce in a stadium, at a pub, or, in my case, on a trek along Scotland’s canal towpaths. Who knows? Now that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has initiated a sister-city partnership with Glasgow, perhaps our cities will cook up another big event that allows the cross-pollination to continue, like a Red Sox game in Glasgow. Maybe, if it happened, thousands of Bostonians could march to the stadium.
Until then, we’ll have to find ways to carry the torch on our own; putting ourselves out there and opening ourselves to new friendships, at home or abroad. For the latter, I recommend walking.
Miles Howard is a Boston-based author, journalist, and the founder of the Walking City Trails, a network of walking routes connecting over 75 green spaces across 23 city neighborhoods. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.