Canal walk to Harecastle Tunnel

History

The walk follows the towpath of the Trent and Mersey Canal from Etruria Junction, where the Caldon Canal branches off, to Harecastle Tunnel. Leading aristocrats, gentry and industrialists of the area engaged James Brindley, then a little-known mill engineer, to survey a canal from the Mersey to the Trent, and a later version of the scheme, the Grand Trunk Canal, was approved by Parliament in 1766. Josiah Wedgwood was one of its main promoters: the canal let fragile china travel to and from the Potteries without breaking on bumpy roads, and the boats could bring back West Country china clay. The canal opened in 1777.

Harecastle Tunnel took 11 years to build. Brindley's tunnel had no towpath, so boatmen had to leg their boats through, lying on their backs on the roof of the boat and using their legs to push it along, which took about three hours on average. By the 1820s this was a bottleneck, and Thomas Telford built a second, larger tunnel alongside, with a towpath, completed in 1827. The two tunnels worked together, each taking traffic in one direction, until Brindley's was closed in 1914 because of subsidence. Boats use Telford's tunnel today.