July 2021
Once again due to Covid restrictions this meeting was organised as a Zoom meeting as our Chairman Roy Brackley started the meeting again, after a problem with access for everyone which thankfully Maurice managed to resolve for us all.
Roy again started by asking for some volunteers to come forward to take over the secretary job as Debbie was wanting to retire having completed her 3 years on the committee doing a grand job. Possibly jobs for two volunteers, one to be Minutes Secretary and one to be Business Secretary.
After a few group notices Di introduced our speaker Richard Thomas who calls himself a ‘Canaloholic’ as he has lived near the canals most of his life and developed an interest in local canals and then the development of the canals in England, Wales and Scotland.
He started his ‘Waterway Wonders’ with The Somerset Space Walk which is a sculpture trail model of the Solar System located in the county. The model uses the towpath which is 22kms (14miles) long. Philip Youngman, a local engineer, designed it to challenge people’s awareness of space. One millimetre on the model equates to an actual distance of 530 kilometres along the Bridgewater and Taunton Canal in Somerset. The Sun is situated at the start of the walk at Higher Maunsel Lock and sets of planets are installed in each direction of the canal between Bridgewater and Taunton. The Space Walk was opened in 1997 by British Astronomer Heather Cooper. Richard showed us the plaques of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mercury, Uranus and Saturn, which state the actual distances in space.
The next place we visited was Foxton Locks in Leicestershire on the Grand Union Canal. This consisted of 2 sets of 5 locks built in the 1800’s and was the longest and steepest staircase of locks which were all operated manually. In Victorian times an inclined plane was constructed to haul the canal boats up the steep terrain, but that was only used for a few years as very expensive to operate using a great amount of water and electricity. The local museum has all the information on the engineering processes.
Richard then moved onto the Trent and Mersey Canal in Derbyshire. It is 93 miles long with 76 locks and 5 tunnels, and was completed in 1777. At that time Leggers walked the boats through the tunnels and Boat Women led the Horses (which pulled the barges) over the bridges in the early 1820s. In 1833 the tunnel keepers house was built and there are many of these houses built about the same time where lock keepers lived and looked after the area. The Harecastle Tunnel was the longest tunnel being 1.6 miles long and was used to transport coal to the kilns at the Staffordshire Potteries.
The Pennines were our next venue to learn about The Standedge to Hebden Bridge Tunnel which was one of the deepest tunnels and in the 1870’s became a very important railway tunnel.
We then moved to Wales and viewed the Menai Suspension Bridge which linked the Dee Valley with Anglesey and was completed by Thomas Telford in 1826. An amazing construction by an early design engineer and many brave workers.
The talk finished with a trip to Scotland where in 1994 the concept of a wheel as a boat lift was conceived and work started on The Falkirk Wheel to link the Forth & Clyde and Union canals. The Queen opened the world’s first and only rotating boat lift in 2002.