Leeds & Liverpool Canal The Yorkshire Side

In the first part of a two-part feature on the longest of Britain’s three trans-Pennine canals, we follow the eastern length as it climbs through impressive staircase locks past mill towns and moorland scenery to the summit

- Martin Ludgate

There is no easy way to engineer a canal crossing the Pennines. But there are different approaches to tackling the problems of routing a navigable waterway across the hills sometimes described as ‘the backbone of England’.

The Rochdale Canal met the challenge head-on by climbing right over the hills, with 92 locks in its 32 miles as it climbed to over 600ft above sea level before descending again. The Huddersfield took an even more direct approach, cutting through three miles of millstone grit at Standedge Tunnel, the longest, highest and deepest ever built in Britain. But the Leeds & Liverpool took a third approach: rather than going over or through the hills, it went right round them. Its engineers kept its summit level to just below the 500ft contour but at the expense of building the longest route ever constructed as a single canal in the country, at 127 miles. And it took the longest time of all of them to complete: begun in the early days of the canal era in 1770, by the time it finally opened throughout in 1816 the start of the railway age was only a couple of decades away.

Now, before anyone jumps on me I’ll admit that I’ve been a little unfair with my comparisons above: those 127 miles cover the route right through to the west coast, while the other two canals go no further west than the Manchester area and relied on other waterways to link them to the Irish Sea. And, similarly, Leeds, is rather closer to the Humber than the other trans-Pennine canals reach. But even so, at times the L&L seems to be taking a rather indirect route between the two cities in its name.