Routes
The Shropshire Union Canal
The Shropshire Union Canal runs from the edge of urban Wolverhampton through some of the most underpopulated areas of England to the River Mersey at Ellesmere Port, about sixty miles in all and taking a fairly leisurely four days to cruise.
Along the Shroppie (as it is known by its many admirers) the scenery is often quite dramatic, with sweeping views across to the Welsh Marches and the strangely shaped ridge called “The Wrekin” from the long embankments and with the atmospheric heavily wooded deep cuttings, a number of which were reputed by the old boat people to be haunted. These days this is also UFO territory! Strange visions are also likely if you have had a few pints of “6X” in the Anchor Inn at High Offley, an old boatmans pub that has survived almost unchanged.
Market Drayton and Nantwich are medieval market towns which still have some of the old half-timbered black and white buildings. However the jewel in the Shropshire Union crown must be Chester, a Roman fortress and port which has many Roman ruins, as well as an almost complete set of medieval city walls which tower above the canal and the unique “rows”, shops on two levels overlooking the street which date back to the middle ages. Chester has many visitors year round, with museums, fine cathedral, good hotels, town-crier and street theatre, but it still manages to feel friendly and small scale. The northern end of the canal is at Ellesmere Port which was a transhipment port from canal to sea-going ships. The old docks now house The National Waterways Museum which has a unique collection of ex working boats and waterways exhibitions.
The ‘New Cut’ is the boaters name for the Middlewich Arm which connects the Shropshire Union north of Nantwich to the Trent and Mersey Canal at Middlewich, an important link in the Four Counties Ring.
The canal was one of the last built and borrowed from the latest railway building methods, taking a direct line cross country, on embankments and through cuttings. These were massive undertakings, Shelmore embankment took six years to build and Woodseaves cutting is 100 feet deep.
The sides of the cuttings are so steep in places that landslips are common and sunlight rarely penetrates. Despite this plants and mosses cling to every available slope.
People and buildings seem very few and far between yet you are little more than twenty miles from the heavily populated cities of Wolverhampton and Birmingham. There are long vistas across open farmlands towards mid Wales and across to Cheshire and Staffordshire from the high canal embankments.
Trent & Mersey Canal & Caldon Canal
The Trent and Mersey Canal begins, as you would expect, within a few miles of the River Mersey, near Runcorn and finishes in a junction with the River Trent in Derbyshire. It is just over ninety miles long and takes about six days to cruise.
Shardlow, near the River Trent, is one of England’s best preserved canal towns. Try the Swan pub at Fradley Junction which has an excellent view of the junction. Stone has some interesting old canal buildings. Shrugborough Hall dates from the 17th century and is surrounded by a landscaped park, the Gatehouse is the size of many mansions! An English Civil war battle was fought just to the north at Hopton Heath. Josiah Wedgwood was involved in getting the canal built and the Wedgwood factory and museum are canalside just south of Stoke on Trent. Middlewich and Northwich are salt towns dating back to Roman times.
The canal is known for its tunnels, at Harecastle, Barnton, Saltersford and Preston Brook. Saltersford has a kink because tunnelling started at different points and didn’t quite meet in the middle! Preston Brook has a large central chamber where a collapse was repaired, and cruising through the pitch dark confines of Harecastle tunnel is an experience nobody forgets!
The double locks on Heartbreak Hill in Cheshire were built in the last century to reduce queues, but many are now unworkable and some have been filled in. The locks got their name not because there are so many, but because they are rarely close enough together to walk and work easily. To real boatpeople they were just the Cheshire Locks!
The Caldon Canal leaves the T&M mainline at Etruria, just north of Stoke on Trent, and meanders into the Staffordshire countryside, running for a short distance along the River Churnet. It has some extremely attractive stretches and the isolated Consall Forge and Black Lion Pub must be visited, plus the restored steam Churnet Railway.
The canal currently finishes at Froghall Wharf which can be reached by some boats through the very low Froghall Tunnel. However the Caldon and Uttoxeter Canals Trust have restored what was the first lock at Froghall on the Uttoxeter Canal. This canal was closed in the nineteenth century and a railway built over it. The railway subsequently closed and part of it is now reopened as the Churnet Valley Railway. There are hopes that eventually both the railway and canal can reach Uttoxeter again, running through the Churnet Valley. See Uttoxeter Canal Restoration.
Cruising the River Weaver has been made easier with the reopening of the Anderton Boat Lift. Previously access required a voyage down the Manchester Ship Canal. Upstream from the Lift the Weaver can be followed through the centre of Northwich to Winsford Flashes. Downstream in goes through pretty countryside to join the Ship Canal below Frodsham. Although the locks are large and the river once carried heavy traffic the coasters which came up to Northwich finished a few years ago, and there is currently no commercial traffic on the River.
The Llangollen Canal
The Llangollen Canal leaves the Shropshire Union Canal just north of Nantwich in rural Cheshire and climbs through deserted Shropshire farmlands to cross the border into Wales near Chirk. It then cuts through increasingly hilly countryside to finish alongside the River Dee tumbling out of Snowdonia, just above Llangollen. It is 41 miles long and takes at least three days to cruise (one-way), more when busy.
The Llangollen, or just The Welsh as it is known to enthusiasts, is arguably the most beautiful canal in Britain, certainly it’s the most popular. The scenery varies from isolated sheep pastures to ancient peat mosses, from tree lined lakes to the foothills of Snowdonia.
Towns along the way include medieval Whitchurch with its half timbered buildings, the interesting market town of Ellesmere set in its own “Lake District”, the fortified border town of Chirk with its National Trust Castle and beautiful gardens and Llangollen itself, sat astride the River Dee, an ancient gateway to Wales beneath the ruins of Castel Dinas Bran. In Llangollen you can enjoy a horse drawn boat trip to the end of the canal, which isn’t accessible by canal boats, or ride behind steam trains to Corwen on the Llangollen Railway.
The Llangollen Canal is very popular and this can mean some peak time queing at locks, especially New Marton and the Grindley Brook staircase, though the lock keepers and volunteers at Grindley Brook usually manage to keep boats moving through in a sensible way. The marina moorings at Llangollen have made it easier to moor up and spend time exploring the town. Generally the top end of the canal is busiest midweek, at many other times the canal can be as tranquil as any other! And if you find there are too many boats around you why not just moor up for a few hours, relax and enjoy the stunning scenery?
The canal has three major engineering feats, two old, one modern. The ‘pioneering masterpiece of engineering’ by which the early civil engineers crossed the difficult landscape between Chirk and Llangollen has resulted in the 18 kilometre length being awarded World Heritage Site status by UNESCO in 2009.
The aqueducts at Chirk and Pontcysyllte were built by the engineers Thomas Telford and William Jessop and were among the first to use cast iron troughs to contain the canal.
At Chirk Aqueduct the trough is supported by conventional masonry arches and hidden inside the masonry, almost as if the engineers were not confident of their new material.
But at the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct the trough is exposed and sits atop 120 foot high slender masonry towers. When you cross it by boat there is an exhilarating sheer drop on the non-towpath side! You should stay below decks if you don’t have much of a head for heights, but do try to look through the windows, otherwise you will miss some amazing views!
The modern engineering feat may seem a little tame by comparison but required considerable twentieth century engineering expertise. Constant landslips on the stretch from Trevor to Llangollen, one of which derailed a train on the railway below, eventually meant closing the section for two years to rebuild long stretches of the embankments above the River Dee and encase the whole length of canal in a concrete trough. The trough is fairly shallow and deep draughted boats may find going slow here.
The Montgomeryshire Canal ran from Welsh Frankton Locks near Ellesmere, where it left the Llangollen Canal, for 38 miles down the beautiful and isolated Welsh Borders through Welshpool to Newtown. It was abandoned in 1944 but about 10 miles are now reopened and there is a 17 mile detached section around Welshpool.
The Montgomery Canal
The Montgomery canal as it is known today runs for 38 miles from a junction with the Llangollen Canal near Ellesmere in Shropshire to Newtown in Montgomeryshire, now part of Powys. Unfortunately it is not possible to navigate the full length and some sections are not in water, others are isolated.
The connected navigable section, although quite short, has much to offer the holiday cruiser. Historic interest is provided by the locks and the old warehouses at Rednal and Queens Head, and the inner man can be satisfied with the pub and restaurants at Queens Head and Maesbury. The whole route is quiet and rural, and because access to the canal is controlled by the lock keeper at Welsh Frankton there are only a limited number of boats on the length at any one time. What a delight! Sample it soon
If you don’t have a boat Bywater Cruises run a horse drawn trip boat from Maesbury during the summer months. The Heulwen Trust runs day trips along the isolated section around Welshpool, free for disabled groups on weekdays. Walkers already have access to the towpath all the way through to Newtown whilst volunteer working parties continue to work towards full restoration for boats as well. Click for more details.
Although now under one name the canal is historically an amalgam of three separate enterprises, further complicated with a number of arms and branches, and changing minds. The Montgomery Canal proper is just the length that runs from Llanymynech to Garthmyl and dates from 1794.
It was designed to connect with a side branch of the Ellesmere Canal that was at that time projected to run from Chester through Wrexham and Ruabon to the River Severn at Shrewsbury. However the speed of development of rival canals and, as ever, a shortage of money caused a pause of several years. That route was abandoned and the completed part at Welsh Frankton, by then connected to the Montgomery, had to wait a number of years before being connected to the rest of the system by a new route to Hurlestone near Nantwich in 1805. The unfinished ‘main’ line towards Shrewsbury then remained as a side arm, the Weston Lullingfield arm, whilst the Llanymynech ‘branch’ of the Ellesmere Canal became the through route to the Montgomery.
At the other end the Montgomery had run out of money too and although originally projected to go to Newtown the canal was only finished as far as Garthmyl. Consequently a new canal company was formed in 1815 to finish the canal line the remaining seven miles right into Newtown, a section that subsequently became known, confusingly, as the Western Branch whilst the original bit with an arm to Guilsfield became the Eastern Branch. After a few years small scale but relatively successful trading the threat of the new-fangled railways loomed over the industry and in 1847 the whole lot became part of the Shropshire Union Railway and Canal Company, whose original intention was to convert a lot of it into railway lines.
Subsequent swift takeovers however found the ownership of the SUR&CC transferred to the London and North Western Railway who then found themselves with a canal network probing deep into the territory of their main railway rival, the Great Western. It seems to have suited them to keep an efficient canal operation running almost to spite the GWR. Under the LNWR and their successor, the LMS, the Montgomery Canal in all its parts continued to operate throughout the 19th century.
Traffic on the canal was mainly local and self contained, much of it centred on the limestone quarries and limekilns at Pant and Llanymynech with coal coming onto the canal from local pits on the Llangollen Canal. A significant traffic was developed by the SU company bringing imported grain in to Maesbury Mill from Ellesmere Port whilst general cargo of all sorts was carried by the company, some of it in their famous ‘fly’ boats which operated as a regular timed ‘next-day’ delivery service until 1920. Some of the small warehouses for this traffic still remain in existence, whilst the tiny half timbered one at Rednal (right) still has pull-out stop and go boards that told the fly boat captain whether there was a collection to be made that day.
The same building also operated for a while as an interchange station for passengers and luggage transferring from express canal ‘packet’ boats to the railway. By the early twentieth century traffic was slight and the canal was really only viable as a feeder to the main SU system. Thus, when a major breach happened below Welsh Frankton locks in 1936 the decision was taken to abandon the canal. Official closure to navigation was finally ratified by Act of Parliament in 1944. Only twenty years later the battle began to reopen it again.
The beauty and remoteness of much of the ‘Monty’ has led to some extraordinary problems for the restoration group. So well did the derelict canal revert to nature that much of it has become a haven for several rare plants and animals and some sections have been designated as S.S.S.I. – Sites of Special Scientific Importance. This may be good news for nature but it has made extra difficulties for the restoration movement. They have now to create and preserve a delicate balance between the needs of a navigation built for boats with the important, though accidental, ecology that developed in the derelict canal.
The Bridgewater Canal
The Bridgewater Canal is as flat as a pancake.The towpath moves along the edge of the Cheshire Plain, gently crosses the Bollin Valley and overlooks the River Mersey. Within Greater Manchester it passes through pleasant suburbs and crosses the waters of the River Irwell.
The Leigh Branch connects to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal near Boothstown. Worsley, an unexpected village of half-timbered houses, green spaces and industrial relics, was the cradle of the modern canal system. By 1774 the Duke of Bridgewater brought coal to the surface by floating it out on the mines’ drainage system and sent it to Manchester in broad beam barges. Two exits from the underground canals of the coal mine can still be seen. Against the left hand cliff face lies a half sunk ‘starvationer’ (boats that carried coal out from the mine).
Barton ‘Tank’ is a mechanical swing aqueduct built in the 1890’s to cross the Manchester Ship Canal. The ‘tank’ can be swung to allow ships to pass on the Ship Canal. It replaced Brindley’s stone aqueduct when the Manchester Ship Canal was constructed.
Canals were nothing new to the Duke of Bridgewater. He owned several inside his mine in Worsley which had been carting coal to villages nearby for 350 years. He had seen Government financed canals in France (Canal Du Midi: opened 1681) and had been aware of improvements locally, to Weaver River (1732) and Sankey Brook (1757). What was new was his ambition to build an aboveground canal across a valley and carry canal water over river water. Engineering skills were based on knowledge gained from mills powered by wind or water and from quarrying stone or mining slate and coal. They were primitive by today’s standards but our motorway embankments rely on the experience gained when engineers built our railways… and many railway engineers learnt their trade on canals. The Duke’s agent, John Gilbert, was project manager and his engineer was the millwright James Brindley who had already surveyed a canal to extend the Trent upstream from Derby into the Potteries (1758).
Not only did they design the 600 foot long sandstone faced Barton Aqueduct spanning the Mersey and Irwell Navigation on three large arches but they achieved the construction of the first ten miles of a broad canal, including long embankments up to 40 feet high in less than two years.
Allowing for inflation, the Duke first spent his personal fortune and then ran up about £20 million of personal debts on his canal. He borrowed from whoever he could; even his tenants and landowners from whom he purchased land. City financiers were thin on the ground in 1760 and the ‘hair-brained scheme’ was such a novelty no one could tell if it was going to make money or not.
As it turned out the Duke’s canal was joining two fast growing centres of the industrial revolution. Canals were more reliable than rivers and they easily took business from pack horses and carts. Eventually money to repay his debts came from an income variously estimated (correcting for inflation) at between £4 million and £6 million a year. After he died his trustees bought the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, they tripled the carriage rates on both systems and, thereby, made the creation of railways worth the investment.
The Macclesfield Canal
Starting at the summit level of the Trent & Mersey, the Macclesfield Canal climbs even higher and becomes one of the highest levels on the system (518 feet) to overlook the Cheshire Plain and cling to the skirts of the Pennines.
Accompanied by waymarked walks, the ‘Mow Cop Trail’ and ‘Middlewood Way’, the canal towpath presents many opportunities for short and long distance walking, staying down near water or climbing high up into the nearby hills with their monuments and follies. The many connections allow walkers and cyclists the choice of either going round in circles or in a long straight line!
Congleton and Macclesfield are both worth a visit, with interesting pubs, Pennine stone architecture and expensive shops which are evidence that this is a desirable place to live, close enough to Manchester to commute, but surrounded by striking scenery.
This late built canal speeded travel from Manchester to the Potteries, Midlands and the south in two fundamental ways. First, less distance than going via Runcorn and not subject to delays by the operation of the tunnels at Preston Brook and, second, it was built after much experience of boatmen’s techniques. For example, where a lock is set close to its neighbour it can be prepared whilst the first lock is being used.
Post war efforts by the Chairman and members of the North Cheshire Cruising Club (founded 1943) and the Inland Waterways Association Second National Rally (1953) drew attention to the lack of maintenance and deterioration of this canal. After a campaigning cruise met apparent sabotage the Peak Forest Canal Society (1964) proposed a ‘Cheshire Ring’ of regenerated canals (including the ‘Macc’) which was finally opened after ten years’ effort in 1974.
Ashton Under Lyne Canal & Peak Forest Canal
The Ashton Under Lyne Canal was an early success for the canal restoration movement. This thoroughly urban canal climbs west-east to Ashton-under-Lyne on the edge of the Manchester conurbation.
The free labour of gangs of canal enthusiasts in 1968 (600 volunteers) and 1972 (1000 volunteers) kick started the remedial works. Much redevelopment has taken place along the canal in East Manchester, partly as a result of the 2002 Commonwealth Games.
Twenty five years after the Bridgewater Canal was opened to Castlefield, two canals were promoted eastwards to the industries of Huddersfield and the limestone quarries of Peak Forest. Typical of the fragmented processes of the Canal Mania years, there was a separate Act (1792) for the 6 miles of the Manchester and Ashton-under-Lyne Canal and its 11 miles of now derelict branches.
The Huddersfield Narrow and the Peak Forest Canals link with the end of the Ashton around the Portland Basin and all three were finally opened at practically the same time (1800). Trade was further boosted when the Cromford and High Peak Railway and Macclesfield Canal funnelled extra trade into the Peak Forest Canal (1831). However, the coming of the railways reduced trade and the canal sold out to the competition (1848).
The Peak Forest Canal runs south from Greater Manchester, the canal towpath linking with hundreds of miles of footpaths up the Goyt Valley, past reservoirs into the stunning scebery of the Peak National Park and along the High Peak Trail.
Bugsworth Basin is an unique canal/tramway interchange where lime, limestone and gritstone arriving on tramways from Derbyshire quarries was transhipped to narrowboats to feed the demands of the Industrial Revolution in the north west. Closed in 1927 after a long decline caused by losing traffic to the railways it was finally reopened after 30 years of hard work by volunteers in 2005 and is a Scheduled Ancient Monument.
Whaley Bridge, the branch terminus, has a stone built warehouse and wharf, now used as a base for restaurant/trip boat. Its two arches, formerly for rail wagons, sit either side of a covered wharf. Within a few yards is the start of the first incline on the rail line to Cromford. Waggons were hauled up by chains powered by a horse capstan at the top of the Whaley Rise for over 125 years.