The Waterways Heritage Spotter: Stop Planks And Stop Gates

They’re useful for draining a canal for work, or protecting it in an emergency - but can also be a piece of canal heritage

- Martin Ludgate

At the end of our last ‘heritage spotter’ article about water-saving side ponds, we ended by suggesting that perhaps they weren’t just a piece of heritage - in these times of uncertain water supplies, they might have a future. By contrast, in the case of this month’s subject there’s absolutely no question of them simply being a part of the canals’ heritage, they’re very much still part of the operation of the waterways network indeed, they were quickly deployed as a first response to the Scottish breach reported on our news pages. But in the way that different canal companies approached the issue in different ways which can still be seen today, they qualify as ‘heritage’ too.

STOP PLANKS: WHAT ARE THEY?

At their most basic, we’re talking about something very simple here: look at the head or tail of most locks, or the narrow masonry-lined channel under a typical bridge, and as likely as not you’ll see a matching pair of vertical ‘slots’ or recesses, one on each side of the canal, a few inches wide, and usually lined with a length of metal channel. These are ‘stop plank grooves’, and they provide a method of temporarily damming the canal off either to drain a limited section of canal for scheduled engineering work, or in an emergency (such as a breach or structure failure) to limit the loss of water.