Llangollen Canal

The Llangollen Canal is one of the most popular holiday inland waterways and can become very busy during the summer months.  It is rightly famous for the 1007-foot long Pontcysyllte Aqueduct towering about the Dee Valley, but the whole of the Welsh section offers some of the most scenic views from a UK canal.  The canal had a complicated construction, but was largely opened by 1806 and became moderately successful in economic terms.  It was taken over by rail companies and traffic dwindled to almost nothing prior to the Second World War.  The Canal was abandoned in 1944, and the then Shropshire and Denbighshire county councils put forward plans to drop road bridges in 1949.  The waterway was kept open as a water supply and the developing leisure interest of the 1950s saw its revival.

Facts and Stats
Pontcysyllte Aqueduct
Waterway Notes
Facilities for Boaters
Notes for Visitors
History – Building the Canal
History – Expansion
History – Fall and Rise
Llangollen Canal connections
Llangollen Canal maps and guides

The name ‘Llangollen Canal’ is a relatively new one for what was for many years known as the ‘Ellesmere Canal’ and the ‘Welsh section’ of the Shropshire Union Canal.  The new name only became used once the route with the opening up of leisure traffic in the 1950s after becoming all but derelict, having been kept open just for water supply, despite being legally abandoned in a 1944 Act of Parliament.  An early, possibly the earliest, printed use of the name ‘Llangollen Canal’ is in a November 1951 edition of a British Waterways staff magazine.

[The photo shows a boat on the narrow feeder section of the Llangollen Canal above Trevor  –  by Sue O’Hare]

Above Hurleston Locks – Sanitary Station and waterpoint
Above Bridge 6 (CW5 8NR) – Swanley Bridge Marina (boatyard)
Below Bridge 20 (CW5 8HG) – Wrenbury Mill (boatyard)
Above Grindley Brook Locks – Sanitary Station, waterpoint and pump-out
Above Bridge 31A (SY13 3AA) – Whitchurch Marina (boatyard)
Prees Branch (SY13 2QS) – Whixhall Marina (boatyard)
Below Bridge 58 (SY12 9DD) – Blackwater Meadow Marina
Above Bridge 58 (Ellesmere Yard) – Sanitary Station
Above Bridge 12 (New Marton) – Water Point
Below Whitehouse Tunnel (LL14 5AD) – Chirk Marina (boatyard)
Above Bridge 29 (LL20 7TX) – Canal Wharf Trevor (boatyard)
Below Bridge 45 – Water Point
Above Bridge 45 – Sanitary Station and Water Point

[The photo shows boats on the Llangollen Canal, next to Blake Mere  –  by Chris Handscombe]

What we now call the Llangollen Canal was constructed in stages by the Ellesmere Canal Company as part of a planned network of waterways linking the River Mersey at Ellesmere Port, formerly a small fishing village called ‘Netherpool’, on the Wirral to the River Severn at Shrewsbury, and with the coal mines of the Ruabon area (near Wrexham) and the limestone quarries around Llanymynech on the Welsh border.  The Act authorising construction was passed in 1793 as part of ‘Canal Mania’, when many ambitious canal schemes were approved on a wave of investors clamouring to put their money into the latest get-rich-quick fashion.

The Chester Canal Company had already built (opened in 1779) a canal from the River Dee in Chester to Nantwich.  The first part of the Ellesmere Canal Company’s canals to be built was the Wirral line, connecting Chester to Ellesmere Port, which opened in 1795.  Work started simultaneously on several parts of the planned network, but next to open was the section between Llanymynech and the bottom of Frankton Locks, opened as an isolated section in 1796.  A connection between the Chester Canal and the Wirral Line followed in 1797.

[The photo shows a lift bridge at Whixhall on the Llangollen Canal  –  by Alan Stopher]

The Ellesmere & Chester and the Birmingham & Liverpool companies merged in 1845 to form the Shropshire Union Canal Company, which a year later merged with Shropshire rail interests with a plan to close canals and build railways on the canal beds.  However, almost immediately the operations of this combined company were leased to the London & North West Railway, which prevented the planned railway building and the waterway interests were developed, especially where they were in the territories of rival rail companies.  Competition from rail, and then roads, took its toll and gradually many of the company’s canals were left to decay, though there remained viable traffics on the Ellesmere and Llanymynech lines until the 1936 when a breach below Frankton locks led to abandonment of the Llanymynech line, by which time the company had been fully bought out by the London & North West Railway in 1922, and absorbed into the London Midland and Scottish Railway in 1923.  The latter gained legal abandonment of all the Shropshire Union system west of Hurleston Junction in 1944, but the line to Llantysilio was kept open because it was a water feeder to the main Shropshire Union line.

Growing leisure traffic and a 1955 water supply agreement with the Mid & South East Cheshire Water Board secured the future of the line, which became known as the ‘Llangollen Canal’, and has  since become one of the busiest canals on the UK inland waterway network, with visitors attracted by the spectacular scenery and outstanding industrial architecture, mostly notably the Pontcysyllte and Chirk aqueducts.

[The photo shows a busy scene, at the junction with the Ellesmere Arm  –  by Alan Stopher]