My narrow escape (Home)

Once we had cleared the Harecastle tunnel the junction with the Macclesfield canal followed in less than a mile. Here my crew Carsten left me, so I was on my own again. Not so bad, because the Macclesfield canal has only one lock flight with 12 locks and otherwise lock-free cruising. This is going to be a rather long post covering the whole length of the Macclesfield canal. The junction with the Trent & Mersey is interesting as it isn't really a junction, but rather the Macclesfield is carried over an aqueduct, while the Trent & Mersey goes through locks below. Macclesfield going over the Trent & Mersey below Macclesfield Canal History The 26 miles long Macclesfield canal dates from the 1830s, so is quite a lot newer than the Trent & Mersey and most of the other canals I have been on. It is very obvious that canal engineering had progressed by then as the canal despite going through very hilly terrain is fairly straight without a lot of locks or tunnels

... or so the guidebook calls it. I had done two difficult long tunnels on this journey already, Blisworth and Braunston. Both are "wide" tunnels, where two narrowboats can pass each other. I am not a big fan of long tunnels, so the prospect of going through an equally long tunnel (2675m), but with only one-way traffic, because it's so narrow was not something I was looking forward to. Unfortunately on the route up the Trent & Mersey, there is no other option. The Harecastle tunnel was built by the already mentioned canal pioneer James Brindley in the very early days of canal building. It was built for one narrowboat only. As it takes about 45 min to go through, this led to major congestion quickly. A second tunnel was built by Thomas Telford (another famous canal engineer of the later days) completed in 1827. The new tunnel included a towpath (now removed), but also only space for one narrowboat. The original tunnel suffered from subsidence and was subsequently c