Sapperton Canal Tunnel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Sapperton Canal Tunnel is a tunnel on the Thames and Severn Canal near Cirencester in Gloucestershire, England. It was the longest canal tunnel, and the longest tunnel of any kind, in England from 1789 to 1811.
The tunnel was opened in 1789 after five years of construction and is 3,817 yards (3,490 m) long. It has no towpath; narrowboats were transported through the tunnel by legging.[1]
It was superseded as the longest canal tunnel in England in 1811 by the Huddersfield Narrow Canal's Standedge Canal Tunnel, which is 5,456 yards (4,989 m) long and remains the highest, longest and deepest canal tunnel in Britain. The Sapperton tunnel and surrounding stretch of the canal are currently not well-maintained. Tourist boat trips into the tunnel were suspended in June 2004.
The Sapperton railway tunnel, on the Golden Valley Line, follows a broadly similar route under the 'Cotswold Edge'.
[edit] The Tunnel in Fiction
In Hornblower and the Atropos by C.S. Forester, Hornblower helps the boatman "leg" through Sapperton Tunnel after the boatman's assistant is incapacitated. Forester spends the first two chapters of the book on the canal-boat journey, Roughly a third of the first chapter is devoted to the tunnel.
