by Fiona Thompson

Created on: November 08, 2011   Last Updated: November 09, 2011

Anglers, boaters, day trippers and even dog walkers all make good use of England’s canals but do you know the history behind them?

Today the canals are a leisure destination in their own right but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long before we had railways and decent roads, the canals were the arteries that transported raw materials and manufactured goods around the country. The first canal was

the Bridgewater, the brainchild of the third Duke of Bridgewater. He needed to find a simple way to transport coal to Manchester where it was much in demand in the factories. Rivers were only useful as far as they were navigable, whereas these artificial waterways could be built according to the needs of the factory owners and many paid for small spurs to come directly to them. The Duke engaged the services of renowned engineer James Brindley who perhaps the greatest contribution of any Englishman to the development of the canals network.

It sounds simple but there were a number of challenges to face. England’s industrial heartland was in the north and the goods were mostly wanted by people in the south and between them were the Pennines. James Brindley provided a very clever solution to this problem: locks. The barge would be steered into a chamber with gates at either end. To go uphill a sluice would be opened in the top gate which would let water into the chamber and elevate the barge to the level beyond the top gate. A barge waiting there to go downhill would sail into the chamber, the gate closed behind it and a sluice opened to release water at the bottom gate, lowering the barge to the original level.

There was no problem too great for the engineers of the day. Embankments and clearings were created in order to avoid lengthy diversions and where valleys were simply too wide and too deep to cross magnificent aqueducts were constructed; Bindley’s Irwell aqueduct that carries the Bridgewater Canal over the River Irwell is one of the finest examples on the network. Where hills proved too difficult to tackle with locks navvies simply tunnelled through the stone such as on the Trent and Mersey Canal which boasts the Harecastle Tunnel, at almost three thousand yards one of the longest on the English Canal Network.

The barges were originally towed by horses for which purpose a path was built on one side of the canal. Where the path changed sides, a bridge was built over which the horse could be led to the opposite bank without having to unhitch

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