Bridgewater's relatively small venture of 17km was finished in 1761 and observed with some approval by Josiah Wedgwood, of Potteries fame. As a potter, Wedgwood had real transport problems in getting materials and products to and from his factories at Stoke. Up to now much of inland freight transportation was by pack horse which was tedious and limiting by it's very nature. So Brindley was commissioned to engineer a far larger canal scheme - the Trent & Mersey Canal. It started off as a link between the R.Weaver (and therefore the Mersey and the sea) and Stoke to import clay from Devon & Cornwall, but was then extended in concept to become part of a much larger system.

The Brindley's Great Cross was made up of the Trent & Mersey Canal which eventually linked the navigable R.Trent near Nottingham to the Mersey. That made an inland transport link between Hull on the east coast to Liverpool on the west coast - and formed the northern and eastern arms of the cross. Secondly the Staffordshire and Worcester Canal linked the R.Severn at Stourport to the Trent & Mersey at Gt. Haywood - which linked Bristol in the southwest into the rest of the system, forming the western arm of the cross. Finally the Oxford and Coventry canals, together, made the southern link from nearby Fradley Junction on the Trent & Mersey canal to Oxford (and therefore London) on the R.Thames. All the other canals came later (and there were many) and linked into the basic great cross structure. One of the main centres of industry in the 1800s was Birmingham, linked by canal and near to the centre of the cross of the original canal system. Birmingham becoming Britain's 'second city' was therefore no accident and resulted principally because of the enhanced transport infrastructure of Brindley's canal system. Birmingham and the Black Country is now interlaced with canals, forming a generalised system called the 'BCN' (Birmingham Canal Navigation). It is said that the BCN has more miles of canal than Venice (although that claim is debateable) - and the BCN is apparently cleaner too.

To travel up and down hills, the system used locks to lower or raise the boat from one level to another. Most canals were actually a bit like a stream travelling downhill from it's summit level. To use the locks meant a constant supply of water was needed, principally from the summit level. The more locks on the system, the more water would be required - so keeping locks to a minimum meant that less water was needed and the cheaper the canal was to build. Building a lock is expensive. So to keep locks to a minimum, these early canals favoured following the natural contours of the land to avoid going up and down hill. These early Brindley designed canals are known collectively as 'Contour Canals'. Passage of goods along these routes was relatively slow in the early days - but then time wasn't a problem then. As the railway companies started to compete with the canals, slow canal passage became a problem - and later canals were designed differently (Telford). We on Willow like the narrow contour canals - they're our favourites because of their narrow intimacy with something different of interest around every bend.

As time went on newer canals were made 'wide beam'. As I understand it, this wasn't generally to increase the size of each boat, but designed to allow two 70ft boats to pass through locks together. Once boats could become motorised, a 'motorboat & butty' (also known as a 'working pair') could pass through a wide beam lock together 'breasted up'. These were two boats acting together - a 70ft motorised narrowboat which towed a second unpowered 70ft boat (the butty boat - originally converted use of horse boats), thus having almost double the carrying capacity. Out on the canal the motor boat towed the butty boat behind it on long tow ropes, but on arriving at a wide lock the two boats would 'breast up' and be worked through the lock at the same time - saving time. 

In modern day times virtually all commercial goods carrying on the canals has ceased mainly due to the size limitations of narrowboats (and therefore their carrying capacity). The 'silver lining' to that 'cloud' is that our narrow canals are now almost exclusively used for pleasure. They tend, by their very narrowness, to be prettier, more quaint, more intimate in nature (particularly the older 'contour canals'). We personally favour the narrowbeam canals for those very reasons. Why not have another look at our cruise map and use the links in the Map Key to discover more about the individual canals we cruise.