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Narrow canal,
Frankton Junction to Newtown: 38 miles.
Maesbury current limit of navigation, 10 miles,8 locks. Isolated
section navigable around Welshpool. |
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 The
Shropshire Union Canal Society is organising working
parties on the Montgomery Canal. They need extra
volunteer help, all you need to be able to do is lift a
shovel! Contact Geoff Munro on 0121 561 5747 or see the
SUCS
website
www.shropshireunion.co.uk
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The
Montgomery canal as it is known today runs for 38 miles from a
junction with the Llangollen Canal near Ellesmere in Shropshire
to Newtown in Montgomeryshire, now part of Powys.
Much of it is still closed to navigation after
its official abandonment back in 1944, but it was one of the
first canals to be considered for reopening by the emerging
canal enthusiast movement in the 1960s and a long and dogged
restoration campaign is slowly but steadily achieving results.
Seven miles through six locks are now navigable from the
junction with the Llangollen Canal (three of them added in 2003)
and a further isolated 17 mile section is usable through
Welshpool.
See trip report along the Welshpool
section. The connected navigable section, although quite
short, has much to offer the holiday cruiser. Historic interest
is provided by the locks and the old warehouses at Rednal and
Queens Head, and the inner man can be satisfied with the pub and
restaurants at Queens Head and Maesbury. The whole route is
quiet and rural, and because access to the canal is controlled
by the lock keeper at Welsh Frankton there are only a limited
number of boats on the length at any one time. What a delight!
Sample it soon. Walkers already have access to the towpath all
the way through to Newtown whilst volunteer working parties
continue to work towards full restoration for boats as well. See
www.mwrt.org
for more restoration details.
Although now under one name the canal is
historically an amalgam of three separate enterprises, further
complicated with a number of arms and branches, and changing
minds. The Montgomery Canal proper is just the length that runs
from Llanymynech to Garthmyl and dates from 1794. It was
designed to connect with a side branch of the Ellesmere Canal
that was at that time projected to run from Chester through
Wrexham and Ruabon to the River Severn at Shrewsbury. However
the speed of development of rival canals and, as ever, a
shortage of money caused a pause of several years. That route
was abandoned and the completed part at Welsh Frankton, by then
connected to the Montgomery, had to wait a number of years
before being connected to the rest of the system by a new route
to Hurlestone near Nantwich in 1805. The unfinished ‘main’ line
towards Shrewsbury then remained as a side arm, the Weston
Lullingfield arm, whilst the Llanymynech ‘branch’ of the
Ellesmere Canal became the through route to the Montgomery. OK
so far? |
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| At the other end the Montgomery
had run out of money too and although originally projected to go
to Newtown the canal was only finished as far as Garthmyl.
Consequently a new canal company was formed in 1815 to finish
the canal line the remaining seven miles right into Newtown, a
section that subsequently became known, confusingly, as the
Western Branch whilst the original bit with an arm to Guilsfield
became the Eastern Branch. After a few years small scale but
relatively successful trading the threat of the new-fangled
railways loomed over the industry and in 1847 the whole lot
became part of the Shropshire Union Railway and Canal Company,
whose original intention was to convert a lot of it into railway
lines. Subsequent swift takeovers however found the ownership of
the SUR&CC transferred to the London and North Western Railway
who then found themselves with a canal network probing deep into
the territory of their main railway rival, the Great Western. It
seems to have suited them to keep an efficient canal operation
running almost to spite the GWR. Under the LNWR and their
successor, the LMS, the Montgomery Canal in all its parts
continued to operate throughout the nineteenth century.
Traffic on the canal was mainly local and self
contained, much of it centred on the limestone quarries and
limekilns at Pant and Llanymynech with coal coming onto the
canal from local pits on the Llangollen Canal. A significant
traffic was developed by the SU company bringing imported grain
in to Maesbury Mill from Ellesmere Port whilst general cargo of
all sorts was carried by the company, some of it in their famous
‘fly’ boats which operated as a regular timed ‘next-day’
delivery service until 1920. Some of the small warehouses for
this traffic still remain in existence, whilst the tiny half
timbered on at Rednal still has pull-out stop and go boards that
told the fly boat captain whether there was a collection to be
made that day. The same building also operated for a while as an
interchange station for passengers and luggage transferring from
express canal ‘packet’ boats to the railway. By the early
twentieth century traffic was slight and the canal was really
only viable as a feeder to the main SU system. Thus, when a
major breach happened below Welsh Frankton locks in 1936 the
decision was taken to abandon the canal. Official closure to
navigation was finally ratified by Act of Parliament in 1944.
Only twenty years later the battle began to reopen it again.
The beauty and remoteness of much of the
‘Monty’ has led to some extraordinary problems for the
restoration group. So well did the derelict canal revert to
nature that much of it has become a haven for several rare
plants and animals and some sections have been designated as
S.S.S.I.s – Sights of Special Scientific Importance. This may be
good news for nature but it has made extra difficulties for the
restoration movement. They have now to create and preserve a
delicate balance between the needs of a navigation built for
boats with the important, though accidental, ecology that
developed in the derelict canal. The compromise that is being
forged is likely to be an important fingerpost for many other
canal restorations in the future. |
