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Around this time there was a sudden surge in the number of canals that were being built. A canal is a man-made waterway. I told you earlier about the difficulty of transporting goods around the country. You can't put many items on to a horse drawn carriage. A horse could pull one ton of freight on a flat, firm road. A horse could pull 30 tons if it pulled a barge on a canal. The early canals were really just ditches filled with water and often followed the route of small rivers.
Many people argue about which was the very first canal of the modern world in England. We have chosen this date as it was then that the Sankey Brook Navigation was opened. In those days canals were sometimes called navigations. This resulted in the men who dug these canals being known as “navvies”. The Sankey Brook Canal linked St Helens in Lancashire with the River Mersey. It was the first of many canals over the next fifty or sixty years. In many cases the idea was to allow inland communities with goods to sell to get these goods to sea ports where they could be exported overseas. As more and more canals were built, they became far more complicated, often going across valleys or even other rivers by means of an aqueduct.
The boats that travelled on these canals were usually called barges. They were very narrow, meaning the canals didn't have to be too wide. As you can see from the picture above, some of the barges had sails but most of the early canal barges were pulled by horses. Horses are not that good at pulling and swimming so a path had to be built at the side of the canal which the towing horse could walk along. This path became known as a tow path, a word we still use today for a path alongside a canal or sometimes a river.
Many of these early canals were built by businessmen who wanted a way to bring items they needed to their factories and then transport the finished goods to markets, sometimes a fair distance away. The noted potter, Josiah Wedgwood, financed one such canal.
As I said the early canals were usually not very wide, about 7 foot or 2 metres, and so the barges were also known as narrowboats.
As well as having to cross valleys, canal builders had another problem. England isn't flat. If it was water in rivers wouldn't really go anywhere. England is hilly and water, as you may have noticed, doesn't go uphill very well. In fact, it doesn't go uphill at all. What could you do to get your barge from a low area to a higher one. The answer was to build something called a lock or, in some cases, as you can see from the pictures, rather a lot of locks. We have made a little animation below to show how these locks worked. Click here to watch it.
Some people had the idea to build a canal system that would link the 4 great rivers of England. See if you can name them from the anagrams below. An anagram is a word which has the correct letters of the word you want but mixed up. Click on each one to see if you are correct.
James Brindley, who had been commissioned to design and build the Bridgewater Canal which ran from the coal mines in Northern England to the city of Manchester and was opened in 1761, began the linking of rivers idea but he died in 1772 and so never saw the finished system. Another notable canal engineer was Thomas Telford. Most of the canal system was built around the new industrial towns in the Midlands and the north of England.
The canal builders and owners were not allowed to own the fleets of barges as this would stop one person running the canal and owning the boats. The boat owners would be charged a toll for travelling along the canal. The boats were usually crewed by three men who would work a shift system of two men working and one sleeping. They could therefore run for 24 hours non-stop. At the start no women would work on the boats and the crews would have small cottage accommodation near the canals for their families.
Later on, next time actually, we will find out what happened to the canals, how they gradually were abandoned and then came back as part of the tourism industry. The last picture shows a modern day canal boat.
Forward to 1760AD
