Vlog 343: The Missing Link
Despite the name of the Staffordshire & Worcestershire canal, it doesn’t actually go through the county town of Stafford so a group of volunteers are now trying to make that happen.
They’ve banded together to resurrect a route that existed a couple of hundred years ago, linking the canal to the town via an existing river (actually two rivers, the Penk and the Sow, but the former will be used only for a few yards as it then joins onto the Sow which runs all the way into Stafford)
The project consists of a breach of the canal to feed water (and boats) into a newly-constructed small mooring basin which will have a lock at the other side dropping boats eight feet down to the River Penk. As mentioned, the Penk then immediately joins the Sow. The canal towpath, which would be interrupted by the breach, will be maintained by building a small bridge for pedestrians.
The river will need dredging over a period of time to make it navigable for canal boats but the river already flows quite happily into town so just a little vegetation management will be needed on top of the dredging. The hope is to build a turning point just outside the Asda supermarket, not far from the historic old terminus. That terminus can no longer be reached as a car park has been built on it!
For lots more information and to join as a volunteer, see the project’s website at https://stafford-riverway-link.co.uk/
What happens if they don’t get planning permission for the lock? Is that even a possibility, or is it really more of a formality?
Has anybody done a retrospective look at the environmental impact from the canal network as it was built two hundred years ago? That is, has anyone determined that digging the canals contributed to or minimized erosion, for example? Whether joining canals to rivers was beneficial or injurious to the rivers in various ways? And other possibilities I cannot even fathom.
Obviously, the canals were a tremendous benefit, and there were tremendous human costs in building them. Are they perceived as a net positive? I assume they are, because of efforts to restore old canals and re-create links that were filled in or even just neglected to the point of unusability. Or are the restoration efforts mainly due to people who like narrowboating and people who enjoy the towpaths? Do people living along the canals generally appreciate them, even if they never boat or fish or even just walk them? (I remember from previous episodes the occasional signs some canalside dwellers would post, but such naysayers exist in nearly every sphere.)
Love these restoration vlogs, and my mind just boggles at the effort required. Then it boggles again at the thought of men doing this work BY HAND two centuries ago!
Cheers from Virginia!
I’m not sure about the planning issue but am presuming they are suitably confident that it can be done. The benefits of canals have been analysed by the Canal & River Trust and they have research reports on their website though I can’t point you to a direct page link offhand, sorry!