If the area was a major commercial shipping hub once, what's the reason it isn't any more? Depopulation? (If it's depopulation, then was it emigration or was it a fall in birth rates?)
> The town is at the junction of the Forth and Clyde and Union Canals, a location which proved key to its growth as a centre of heavy industry during the Industrial Revolution. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Falkirk was at the centre of the iron and steel industry, underpinned by the Carron Company in nearby Carron. The company made very many different items, from flat irons to kitchen ranges to fireplaces to benches to railings and many other items, but also carronades for the Royal Navy and, later, manufactured pillar boxes and phone boxes. Within the last fifty years, heavy industry has waned, and the economy relies increasingly on retail and tourism.
So, yes, deindustrialization. But being at a key canal junction doesn't mean much today, since modern railroads and steamships rendered the canals obsolete a century-ish ago.
That is true for the English narrow channels which are way too narrow to support any kind of large vessel, but not true in general - the Mittellandkanal in Germany for example still sees a huge amount of traffic and there’s regular infrastructure investment going on into the canal network in many places. One example is the new boat lift in Niederfinow which is not as architecturally beautiful as the Falkirk wheel, but lifts entire river barges.
I'd not be surprised that industrialists would do such a thing as buy up the competition and shut it down, but I'd be a bit surprised if canals were much competition after railways really came in?
Railway companies did buy and close them though. On one local one they made permanent destructive changes to stop them being easily reopened.
Also, the world got a lot bigger, to the extent that a tiny canal was no longer meaningful.
The population of Scotland as a whole has grown slowly and continuously - nothing comparable to the mass depopulation of Ireland, even when you consider the Highland Clearances. It has however mostly concentrated in the economic centers of Edinburgh and Glasgow.