Erewash Excursion

There’s more to the Erewash valley than the Erewash Canal: follow a circuit around the valley’s navigable and abandoned canals, through a green but formerly industrial landscape.

To a canal boater the name Erewash means a single canal reaching northwards from Trent Lock to a terminus near Langley Mill on the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire borders. But at one time the Erewash Valley contained no fewer than five canals, until they gradually began to close down from the 1890s onwards.

By the 1960s all that was left was the 12-mile cul-de-sac that survives today, but there are traces to be found of all four of the others. One of these – the Derby – features in our Restoration article this month, while our walk follows a circuit that takes in part of one of the others and a small fragment of a third, as well as the upper section of the Erewash.We’ll start at Gallows Inn Bridge on the Erewash Canal at Ilkeston – partly because there’s a handy place to park by the playing fields (and also the new Ilkeston railway station is not far away), but also because we researched the walk while enjoying the recent IWA Festival of Water there – see our news pages.

The Erewash has in the past had something of a reputation among some boaters for being rather an industrial wasteland. You’ll soon realise as you begin walking northwards that if that was ever true, it certainly isn’t today. Yes, there is an industrial estate on the right, but it’s well screened from the canal by a line of trees, while on the left, back gardens of houses run down to the water.Typically for an early canal (it opened in 1779) the Erewash meanders as it follows the contours, gradually climbing through three well spaced-out broad-beam locks before Ilkeston is left behind and there are fields on both sides.