Six ducks boating

In July this year, while we were staying in Shropshire, I saw six ducks going boating.


Yes, they're ducks, not fagends in an ashtray.

I remember taking the photo on the Shropshire Canal at the bottom of Hay Inclined Plane, but my camera tells me I took it just six minutes from the Encaustic and Decorative Tiles factory at Jackfield, which is more than six minutes' walk away. Oh - I've remembered now. I was on my bike.


There may be more than six. I can count six heads (plus one reflected). They won't get very far as the platform is tethered.

Hay Inclined Plane was nearly Hay Boat Lift

It is said that the original scheme to connect the upper and lower levels of the Shropshire Canal at Blists Hill/Coalport was to build a boat lift to overcome the 207 feet difference in height. To this end William Reynolds, a local ironmaster, started to tunnel horizontally into the side of the hill in 1786. After 300 yards the workers hit a spring of bitumen, and work on the tunnel stopped while this valuable natural commodity was tapped, put into barrels and sold.


According to the Ironbridge Gorge Museums website the bitumen was boiled in cauldrons at the entrance to the tunnel to convert it into pitch for preserving timber; some was processed for use in lamps and as a varnish. At first they were collecting 4,500 gallons of bitumen a week. This slowed to 1,000 gallons a week, gradually dimishing over fifty years until the extraction stopped.

Now known as the Tar Tunnel, we donned our hard hats and walked at a stoop to the gate a hundred yards in. Bitumen still oozes through the brick walls and collects in pools in openings off the tunnel, looking like black water. (No photo, sorry!)


The tunnel is said to extend 1100 yards under Blists Hill, probably connecting up with the coal mine shafts. A plateway or railway runs the length of the bit we had access to, and there are some wagons near the entrance.

The bitumen was reckoned to be far more vauable than the boat lift, and so the inclined plane was built instead.

Hay Inclined Plane

When we visited Blists Hill the first thing we did was to find the Shropshire Canal and walk along the towpath to the Hay Inclined Plane. Just in front of us as we walked along was a man in Victorian dress, who turned out to be the "guide" for those who found their way to the plane and wanted to find out more about it. After a promising start the canal quickly turned into a weedy swamp. Our guide explained that the water level had been lowered so as to minimise problems with leakage. I suppose if there's no water it can't leak anywhere!


The inclined plane was used to raise tub boats such as the one below - about 20 feet by six feet with a capacity of about five tons - from a short (half-mile) section of canal at Coalport by the river Severn to the level of the Shropshire Canal about 200 feet higher.


At the upper level boats would be floated onto wheeled cradles which were then hauled up a short slope on rails, before being let down in a controlled descent of the plane to the canal at the bottom, where they would float off. The purpose of the short slope in the "wrong" direction at the top was to keep the water in the upper canal.


Looking in the opposite direction, down the incline, many of the original rails have been replaced with more modern ones so as to give an impression of what it looked like when working.


At the bottom the rails just disappear into the water. The house by the steps is now a lovely tea room.


The traffic was mainly loaded tub boats, carrying cast iron, coal and clay, going downhill, pulling up empty tub boats as they went. A steam engine was built in the engine house (below) to assist in the operation, replacing a horse gin.


During the life of the inclined plane a railway was built passing underneath (this is now the Silkin Way). Now a bump (which my photos don't show) in the plane reveals how the strong foundations for the bridge have held up the track above, while the rest has subsided a little. The sides of the gorge are, we were told, constantly on the move.


The canal at Coalport with a bottle kiln from the china factory. Goods were transhipped to barges or trows to be taken down the Severn.


Next time, how the Hay Inclined Plane shouldn't really have been built.

edited to add: Much useful information about the Shropshire Canal, its inclines and tub boats can be found here.

Blists Hill blast furnaces

Just a quick post tonight as it's late. These are the remains of three blast furnaces at Blists Hill in Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire. They were built in the 1830s and 1840s and operated until 1912. They took some of their raw materials - iron ore, coal or coke and limestone - from tub boats on the Shropshire Canal which runs just behind and above the furnaces, and the pig iron they produced was carried away by canal too.


Some coke making was done on the site, and minerals were also mined very near by.