Dukart's Canal

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] History

Dukart's Canal that was built by Daviso Du Acort, otherwise known as Davis Dukart, in the 1760s-70s. The canal was built as a solution to the problem of getting coal from the Drumglass Colleries to the Coalisland Canal, it cost too much and took far too much time doing it by horse so this was the solution. Dukart's plan was not to use locks, which had caused manys a trouble to builders on the Coalisland Canal, but to use gravitional inclines, the one and only time they have ever been used in the whole of Ireland on a waterway system. Bascially what a gravitional incline is where for example in this case one boat would come down one side of the incline, and the force of that boat would make the other boat on the opposite side pull up or down depending on which direction the first boat was going. It seemed good in theory. But as Dukart's Canal work nearly finished in late 1774 he knew something wasn't working right, the incline planes. The fields on which the inclines planes were built on were too steep, there wasn't enough water source coming from Farlough lake which was another big factor, Dukart in a final act of desperation in late 1776 put rails on the incline planes in a bid to see his Canal succeed but it wasn't to be. Legend has it that only ever one tub boat ever came down Dukart's Canal in 1778, plainly just for the fact that he could be put in Jail for bad usage of public funds.

[edit] Dukart's Legacy

Nothing really remains of the Canal but Dukart has still left a standing legacy and his name will be forever linked to Newmills and to some extent the Coalisland Canal, his outstanding Aqueduct still stands in Newmills with water going through the middle arch, there are 2 remains of the Inclined Planes, or Dry Hurries as they were to become known as, one in Drumreagh in a field not far off the Brackaville Golf Course and the other one (the biggest of the 3 planes) on the Quintaminnus Road near Newmills (although this one is largely grew over and is hard to see). The town of Newmills was built around Dukart's failed Canal.

Dukart was in many ways way ahead of his time, inclined planes are frequently used today in different parts of the world in many different methods, it was a very ambitious gamble that unfortunately for Davis Dukart didn't pay off. He later died in 1785, he left the Tyrone area soon after the Disaster that came to be known as Dukart's Canal.

There is a great section about Dukart's Canal in the History of Coalisland Canal book, written by Tommy McIlvenna.

[edit] Pictures of the Doomed Experiment

[1] [2] [3] [4]