WORK IN PROGRESS

As the winter repair and maintenance programme on the canals enters its final stages, we visit two of this year’s major projects - rebuilding a problematic tight lock on the Llangollen and lining a leaking embankment on the Macclesfield...

Alongside the many routine closures for regular maintenance work – such as lock gate replacement - during the Canal & River Trust’s winter stoppage season, there are a smaller number of much more major jobs being tackled. We’ve visited two: one a well-known problem site that’s been causing difficulties for boaters for some years; the other a far less high-profile but equally important project...

MACCLESFIELD CANAL PALMERSTON STREET EMBANKMENT, BOLLINGTON

Cruising through Bollington, you can’t help but notice one of the Macclesfield Canal’s major engineering features, the huge embankment crossing a small valley. But that’s not actually where the trouble lies: you might not even notice that a little way further north, where the canal passes the impressive Clarence Mill (a former textile mill now converted for a variety of modern uses), there’s another significant length of embanked canal. It’s not at all obvious, because it’s only embanked one side – the west side, opposite the mill – and it’s largely hidden by trees. But the lie of the land, and the widening of the channel to provide moorings, mean that it’s built up some 10 to 15 metres above the ground level below. It’s been giving some problems in recent years, and this winter it’s the subject of a major £1m project by CRT’s main engineering contractors Kier to reline the canal.