Shrewsbury Canal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Shrewsbury Canal (or Shrewsbury and Newport Canal) was a canal in Shropshire, England. Dating back to 1793, it was officially abandoned in 1944; many sections have disappeared, though some bridges and other structures can still be found.
Contents |
[edit] Route
The canal was authorised by an Act of Parliament in 1793 to link the town of Shrewsbury with the east Shropshire canal network serving coal mines and ironworks around Oakengates, Ketley, Donnington Wood and Trench, nowadays part of the new town of Telford. From here, the 17 mile (27 km) canal wended its way first to Wappenshall (where it was later joined by a branch of the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal, today known as the Shropshire Union Canal), before meandering north-west over the River Tern at Longdon-on-Tern, past Uffington and through the 970-yard Berwick tunnel (at the time, the longest canal tunnel in Britain, and the first equipped with a towpath through it) towards Shrewsbury where it terminated at a basin adjacent to the Buttermarket building.
[edit] Construction
A Josiah Clowes was appointed chief engineer, but died in 1795 part way through the project. He was succeeded by Thomas Telford, then just establishing himself as Shropshire's County Surveyor and already engaged on the Ellesmere Canal slightly further north.
One of Telford's first tasks was to rebuild a stone aqueduct over the River Tern at Longdon-on-Tern which had been swept away by floods in February 1795. Telford's stone-mason instincts initially led him to consider replacing the original structure by another stone-built aqueduct, but the heavy involvement of iron-masters – notably William Reynolds - in the Shrewsbury Canal Company led him to reconsider. Instead, it was rebuilt using a 62-yard cast iron trough cast in sections at Reynolds' Ketley ironworks and bolted together in 1796. The aqueduct – the world's first large-scale iron navigable aqueduct (narrowly predated by a much smaller 44ft-long structure by Benjamin Outram on the Derby Canal) - still stands today, but is marooned in the middle of a field.
At Trench, the eastern end of the canal was linked to the Wombridge Canal, 75ft higher than the Shrewsbury Canal, by an inclined plane to allow vessels to be transferred from one canal to the other. From the Wombridge Canal, boats could travel via the Shropshire Canal southwards to the River Severn at Coalport. The Shrewsbury Canal was finally finished in 1797.
[edit] Expansion
It was originally a narrow canal intended for horse-drawn trains of 20ft-long 'tub boats' no wider than 6ft 4inches. However, in preparation for when the Newport branch of Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal to Wappenshall opened in 1835, the section from there to Shrewsbury was surveyed in 1831 and subsequently widened to take standard narrow boats. This heralded the canal's most profitable period, but it was short-lived.
[edit] Decline
In 1846, the Shropshire Union Railways and Canal Company bought most of the east Shropshire canal network, including the Shrewsbury Canal. London and North Western Railway Company took control shortly afterwards and allowed the canal to decline. In 1922, the London, Midland and Scottish Railway took over the canal and the basin in Shrewsbury was closed. LMS finally abandoned the canal network in 1944.
