SHROPSHIRE UNION CANAL

In the second part of our guide, we leave the deep cuttings and high embankments behind for the gentler northern lengths leading to historic Chester and Ellesmere Port

- Martin Ludgate

We ended the first part of this two-part guide to the Shropshire Union when our northbound journey brought us to Nantwich, where we crossed the distinctive cast iron aqueduct spanning a main road and designed by Thomas Telford, rounded a curve, passed under a characteristically fine skew bridge carrying the towpath, and reached a junction.

A junction? Yes, because this is where what was originally the Birmingham & Liverpool Junction Canal, opened in 1835,whose straight, railway-like route through deep cuttings and over high embankments we’ve been following all the way from Autherley Junction, comes to an end. It meets the former Chester Canal, a much older waterway forming the next part of what we today call the Shropshire Union Canal - that name coming from an 1845 amalgamation which put the whole route (plus the Llangollen and Montgomery canals) under one ownership.

And it’s a proper junction, not just an end-to-end meeting. The Chester Canal, opened in 1779 from Chester to Nantwich, ended in a dead end basin in Nantwich, and the route we’ve been travelling on makes an oblique junction with it, just a few yards short of the terminus.

You can turn sharp left (and at really is a sharp one!) into the basin which is now home to quite a boating centre, with moorings, a boatyard and a hirefleet based there; however we’ll bear very gently right to continue towards Chester. But before you do so, don’t miss the chance to moor up and walk into Nantwich (the aqueduct is the closest point to the centre), only the second sizeable place we’ve passed since the beginning of the Shroppie, and a fine historic market town with a splendid selection of black and white half-timbered buildings - many dating from the rebuilding of the town after a disastrous fire in 1583.