Coals to Manchester
Malcolm Borrowdale

	The area to the North of Manchester is rich in coal but it was never easy to work. Some coalfields have small numbers of thick seams but in South Lancashire there are a large number of quite thin seams. In addition the rock strata (coal seams included) dip sharply at about 1 in 5 toward the south and are heavily faulted. That means that a horizontal heading would cut through many seams in a short distance including cutting through the same seam more than once where faults caused its level to be different. Coal was cut up the slope into each seam. That takes us rather ahead of ourselves in the history of coal mining in the area.
	The earliest mines in the area would have been adits, horizontal or sloping tunnels into a coal seam where it outcrops at the surface. Then there were bell pits. These had a short shaft down to the coal seam which was then mined in all directions until the (more or less bell-shaped) hole made was of such a size that the roof was no longer safe. The pit was then abandoned and another one sunk close by. These would be ladder pits, that is, the access was by a ladder or series of ladders rather than by any kind of mechanical lifting gear.
	When deeper pits were sunk it was necessary to have a “gin” (shortened from engine) to lift men and coal. Such gins could be operated by man-power for short lifts but bigger pits had horse-gins worked by one or two horses walking in a circle turning a large beam or a wheel mounted on a frame above them. The wheel or beam could have a winding drum at its centre with the rope going over a pulley at the top of the pit shaft or more complicated mechanisms could be employed with wooden shafting and gears.
	Deeper pits brought another problem - water. Water drained into pits and had to be removed somehow. Wherever it was possible mines were drained by digging a sough (pronounced suff) on a slight down slope from the bottom of the mine to a hillside or river bank. Some of the soughs are of considerable length and only about eighteen inches (45cm) in diameter - a difficult job for even a small miner. Of course, that was not always possible and the extent of mining was limited by the ability to drain the workings. The horse-gin could be adapted to work pumps or bucket chains but could not always keep up with the ingress of water.
	A further problem for those who would make money out of the coal under their land was getting it to a suitable market. The River Irwell upstream of  Salford and Manchester was not navigable to ordinary boats and the only alternative was carts over roads that were often impassable in wet winters or by packhorse. Some of the mines around Ringley and Clifton used very cheap simple boats to float coal down the river. Even that was not possible in dry summers when almost the entire flow of the Irwell sometimes disappeared through cracks and faults in the sandstone near Giant’s Seat (upstream of where the canal aqueduct and railway viaduct - both disused - now stand at Clifton) emerging a little further down. Such boats could not be returned against the flow of the river and were broken up after use. From the pits of Worsley coal would have to be carried by cart to the Mersey and Irwell Navigation at Barton to be put into boats for upstream transport or carried by land all the way. All this made coal an expensive commodity in Manchester and, to an extent, limited the growth of the town.

Engineering solution at Wet Earth

	Clifton Colliery, owned by the Heathcote family of Derbyshire, was in the Irwell valley in Clifton. Its pit head was on the piece of flat land extending about quarter of a mile on the west bank of the river which, at that point is in an almost vertical sided sandstone gorge some 20 feet deep. About 1750 the mine was deepened to 150 feet to reach the Doe seam but it proved almost impossible to drain the mine. The available pumps could not keep pace with rising water and the mine could not be operated efficiently. The mine gained the name by which it was known from then onwards - Wet Earth.
	In the middle of the eighteenth century technology of the day was largely in the hands of millwrights who were masters of using wind and water power to operate machinery. One such millwright was James Brindley. Some accounts would make him out to be an uneducated yokel; he was nothing of the kind. Although he was the son of a crofter he had served an apprenticeship as a wheelwright and millwright and had run his own business in Leek (Staffordshire) since the early 1840s becoming well known and respected in his profession throughout the north and west Midlands. It would be no accident that he was called in to try to solve the problems of West Earth. The coal mine was owned by a member of the Heathcote family of Hartington in Derbyshire, not far from Great Rocks where Brindley was born. While James Brindley is credited with the work and it was undoubtedly his expertise that made it possible, he was really what would now probably be called a consultant engineer and the work on site was probably supervised by  Matthew Fletcher, a mining engineer. Fletcher was the son of a prominent local coal owner and later took over the Clifton estate from Heathcote
	Brindley was no exponent of steam power although Newcomen’s atmospheric engines had been in use for years for the very purpose of working pumps in mines. Wind power would not be reliable enough for the continuous job of draining the mine so it was water power that Brindley used.
	The distance of the mine from the river bank and the steep sides of the gorge made it impossible to adopt a simple solution of a waterwheel turned by the flow of the river and a much more ingenious scheme was needed. A mile or so upstream of the mine a weir was built across the river at Ringley. This weir would build up a head of water at a height slightly greater than the land at the pit head and considerably higher than the river level at Wet Earth. From just above the weir a tunnel was bored under the low land on the opposite (east) side to a point almost opposite the mine. From there, still in tunnel, water fell down a vertical shaft, passed under the river and came up another vertical shaft on the west side where it ran into an open leat (channel). The leat ran along the edge of the gorge for several hundred yards before making a turn away from the river and towards the colliery. Near the pit head the channel ran into another short tunnel leading to a large chamber in which was a breast-shot water wheel - breast-shot means that the water runs into the buckets of the wheel about halfway up one side.
	The water wheel operated the pumps that drained the mine and the waste water, including what had been brought up from the pit, ran away through yet another tunnel at a lower level. This last tunnel runs back more or less underneath the open channel to an opening in the river bank and allow water to flow away into the Irwell.
	The scheme was in operation by 1757 and remained in use until the mine closed in 1928 although the wheel had been replaced in the 1860s. The tunnel and “inverted siphon” under the river continued to supply water to Fletcher’s Canal (from where it was used to drive a vertical water turbine at Clifton) until 1960. Then the vertical shafts of the siphon were blocked off and the tunnel was partly destroyed by the building of the new Ringley sewage treatment works.
	The open channel from the its inland turn was later widened and made into a canal (Fletcher’s Canal) and extended along the river bank to join the Manchester Bolton and Bury Canal where the latter turns through a right angle at the southern end of Clifton aqueduct. An early form of containerisation was used for coal transport here. Boats on Fletcher’s Canal (which also connected to Botany Bay colliery by a branch and to Robin Hood colliery by a tramroad incline. 
The area around Wet Earth Colliery with its filled mineshafts, buildings demolished apart from a tall chimney, dry canal canals with remains of boats, what appeared to be a canal tunnel disappearing into nowhere and curious side weirs apparently down into the ground was very difficult to make sense of until someone wrote a book on it in 1968, then all was explained.

Worsley and the Bridgewater Canal

	Francis Egerton, the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, having been crossed in love and failing to make the marriage he hoped for, abandoned his home in the south of England and retired to his estate at Worsley. There he concentrated his efforts on making money from his coal mines. The problem with Worsley coal was the high price that had to be asked for it in Manchester because of the difficulty of transport. The 1st Duke had launched a half-hearted scheme to make Worsley Brook navigable down to the Irwell at Barton, a distance of about 3 miles but it came to nothing.
	A scheme similar in many ways to the Worsley Brook scheme had been opened for part of its length in 1757. That was the Sankey Brook Canal from near St Helens to the Mersey at Warrington. This was originally envisaged as a scheme to make Sankey Brook navigable by using some sections of canal and the installation of a number of locks. The plans were modified to make it a proper canal using the brook only as a source of water. It was later extended along the north shore of the Mersey estuary to Widnes and renamed the St Helens Canal. An early experiment in steam powered transport was carried out here. In 1797 a steam powered boat travelled both ways along the canal but it was only an experiment and man-power remained the means of propulsion for many years.
	The 3rd Duke must have been influenced by the success of  water transport elsewhere and the enthusiasm, at the time, for canal schemes (the survey was already in progress for the Trent and Mersey Canal), in his decision to have a canal from Worsley to Manchester. The Canal du Midi in southwest France had been operating successfully for years and it is possible that the Duke had seen it.  It was originally intended that the canal should be to the north of the River Irwell. James Brindley, already engaged on the Trent & Mersey Canal and well known among the coal owners for his work at Wet Earth was engaged as engineer and was very ably assisted by John Gilbert, the Duke’s agent.
	Before an Act of Parliament for the construction of the canal was obtained the line was changed to run south from Worsley to Stretford, crossing the Irwell on an aqueduct at Barton, and then to approach Manchester from the southwest to reach its terminus at Castlefield. This new line would make it possible to construct the extension from Stretford to Runcorn to compete with the Mersey and Irwell Navigation for traffic to and from Liverpool and to a junction with the Trent & Mersey canal near Preston Brook thus connecting Manchester and the Mersey to the Trent and thence to the east coast port of Hull and to Leeds and York. It was probably Brindley’s insight that saw the future importance of linking to other waterways to form his “Grand Cross” of canals linking the Mersey, Humber, Thames and Severn. It was certainly his idea that the Irwell could be crossed by an aqueduct - a new concept - rather than by locks down and then more locks up again.
	The first line of the Bridgewater Canal ran from inside the Duke’s coal mines at Worsley via Patricroft and Stretford to Manchester where it terminated in Castlefield basin to the south of the canal. The original basin was later supplemented by the basins in the area between the canal and Liverpool Road. In the early 1890s the old stone arched aqueduct at Barton was replaced by the new steel swing aqueduct over the Manchester Ship Canal. One arch of the old aqueduct - a wonder of the modern world when it was built - was rebuilt at right angles to its original position and can still be seen where Barton Lane passes under the canal. The old aqueduct is the only part of the original Bridgewater Canal that you cannot still travel along by boat (the canals inside the mine workings were not part of the main canal).
	As well as carrying coal there was a small number of passenger boats. At first they were converted barges but soon proper passenger boats with saloons and coffee rooms were built. There were services from Manchester to Lymm, Stockton (for Warrington and Liverpool), Preston Brook and Runcorn (for Liverpool).The packet boats had precedence over other traffic and did the run from Manchester to Runcorn in 9 hours - an hour longer than the Mersey  Irwell’s boats when they started in 1806 - and were part of an integrated transport system as the modern jargon has it. Coaches to Warrington and Liverpool met the boats at Stockton and there were steamboats to Liverpool from Runcorn connecting at Weston Point with a service to Northwich on the Weaver. When the Leeds and Liverpool Canal’s Leigh branch opened, the Manchester to Worsley passenger service was extended to Leigh, Wigan and Scarisbrick (for coaches to Southport) and Liverpool. Some of the Manchester to Liverpool passenger traffic by both routes went when the railway opened in 1830 but in 1837 when the Grand Junction Railway opened from Newton to Birmingham canal boats provided a connecting service from Preston Brook station (adjacent to the canal) to Runcorn. Passenger carrying gradually declined against railway opposition but there was still a service between Manchester and Stockton in the 1860s. In 1851 when Queen Victoria stayed briefly at Worsley Hall she travelled from Patricroft railway station to Worsley in a very ornate specially built horseboat drawn by horses with liveried postillions - the boat ended its days in the 1930s as a sightseeing boat round Manchester docks.
For many years the means of propulsion of boats on the canal was horses although man haulage was used on some canals and on a few mules or donkeys were used. It has already been mentioned that there was an experiment with a steam boat on the Sankey Canal in 1797 and, in the same year what was probably the same boat travelled the length of the Bridgewater from Runcorn to Manchester but self-powered boats were a long time coming into common use. In 1799 the Duke had a steamboat built and very early in the 19th Century he ordered a number of boats like the Charlotte Dundas that had been successfullt tested on the Forth & Clyde Canal. The Duke (and his title) died in 1803 and the steamboat order was cancelled by the Bridgewater Trustees.
	By the end of the 19th Century there would still be plenty of horse boats but steam barges were common. The fast regular boats of carrying companies like Fellow, Morton & Clayton or Pickfords were steam narrowboats pulling unpowered “butty” boats. Steam engines allowed boats to run almost non-stop but for short runs they were not very efficient and took a long time to get steam up. The invention of the oil engine put that right and they became the normal means of propulsion for canal boats, Bollinder  (or semi-diesel) engines being the commonest type. Modern canal boats are almost universally diesel powered.
	
The Underground Canals

	There are many tunnels on the canals of England, the longest being the 3 miles long Standedge Tunnel between Diggle and Marsden at the summit of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal which is about to be reopened. All these tunnels pale into insignificance when compared to the underground canals of Worsley. The construction of these was probably little to do with Brindley but a great deal to do with the mining engineer John Gilbert.
	At Worsley Delph you can still see the mouths of two low tunnels going into the rock face from the basin where the original Bridgewater Canal began. The water that still flows from the tunnels is heavily laden with iron oxide and the canal has a bright orange/brown colour for several miles because of it. There is no visible clue as to what lies beyond the openings. If you could enter the tunnels (and nobody has for some 30 years) you would find that the two tunnels join to form a single underground canal about quarter of a mile from the entrances. This canal, the main level, continues for a little over 5 miles to a point under Dixon Green near Bolton. As each coal seam is intercepted, tunnels go off on each side. From these tunnels coal was mined up the slope of the seam (northwards) so that it could be taken down to boats for transport out of the mine.
	The ground climbs gradually northwards from Worsley and for roughly half the length of the main level there is another canal (the upper level) directly above it and with similar side branches. There are also two shorter deeper levels directly below. The main and upper levels were connected by an inclined plane with cradles on wheels for carrying boats so that coal mined in the upper level could be brought out at Worsley Delph. Coal from the deeper levels could only be brought out by shafts and the boats used there were smaller and had to be lowered down shafts (and brought up through the shafts when they were in need of repair). The inclined plane was below Ashton’s Field near Walkden, the site of one of the last surviving collieries in the area. There was a sloping adit or day-eye (pronounced day-ee) from the upper level to the surface at the boatyard in Walkden. This was close to Manchester Road more opposite where the Tesco supermarket now stands. It was where underground canal boats were built and repaired and, later, was the site of the main locomotive shed and works of the extensive Bridgewater Collieries railway system.
	Altogether there were more than 40 miles of underground canals beyond those two little tunnel mouths at Worsley. The tunnels were not large enough for ordinary canal barges or even narrowboats. The boats used were built of wood and were about 40 feet long and 4 feet wide, pointed at both ends. They were known as “starvationers” because you culd see their ribs. Boats were worked into the canals by using a short rope with a hook on the end which could be hooked into iron loops in the roof so that the boat could then be pulled along for a few feet before moving the hook to the next loop. Moving loaded boats out of the canal was made easy by the flow of water draining from the workings. Near the entrances the flow was increased by using cloughs (locally pronounced clows) just outside the entrances. They were devices for blocking the channel so that a head of water built up; when a clough was opened the flow of water washed boats out of the tunnel. The remains of the cloughs and their mechanism can still be seen but nothing remains of the complicated ventilation system at the Delph which was driven by water falling from the ponds on the flat land above. Coal was carried to Manchester in groups of mine boats or, later, by transhipment to bigger barges.
	Along the line of the underground canal there were a number of shafts. These were needed for ventilation and for winding men and coal. Some of the names such as Fire Pit and Fan Pit indicate how ventilation was achieved. As time went on larger pits were established along the line. The shafts were very close to the canals at Edge Fold, Ellesmere and Ashton’s Field collieries and even long after the underground canals were used for carrying coal (last used 1887) water pumped out of the deeper levels of the mines was discharged into the them.
	The Worsley underground canals were not unique. Just a few miles along the Bridgewater Canal towards Leigh there was a short underground level with side tunnels at Boothstown; there was another short level from Fletcher’s Canal at Clifton into Botany Bay colliery and one of the coal mines on the Derbyshire moors above Buxton was worked by boats on an underground level as was the Speedwell mine (Blue John fluorite) at Castleton, Derbyshire but none of the others was on anything like the scale of Worsley.
	The entrance to the underground level at Boothstown may still be visible occasionally. I last saw it during a very dry summer some 15 years ago. The whole line of the Bridgewater Canal branch to Leigh had an unmined area of coal left beneath it to avoid subsidence. However, all the surrounding ground has subsided leaving the canal on an embankment. No similar unmined pillar was left below the Boothstown level so its entrance lies at the end of a marshy pond to the north of and some feet below the Bridgewater. The top of the arch of the tunnel may sometimes show above water level in very dry weather. It is near Vicar’s Hall bridge.
	
The Railway Revolution

Canals were the height of transport technology for a relatively short time before railways took over most of their roles. There were many private tramroads, the precursors of railways, in this area of the Lancashire coalfield. These were short, of various gauges and did not interconnect but some of the earliest railways were in the same area. The Bolton & Leigh Railway (opened in 1831) was intended to link the Manchester Bolton and Bury Canal at Bolton to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Leigh to provide easy transport between Liverpool and both Bolton and Bury. Before it was completed an extension was already being constructed to meet the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (opened 1830) at Kenyon near Leigh. The railway from Bolton to Kenyon anticipated modern business practice by many years in that it was built and owned by the railway company but operations were leased (franchised would be the modern term) to a carrier, Hargreaves of Bolton. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway itself does not touch the coalfield in this area being two or three miles to the south.
Within a few years the Manchester Bolton and Bury Canal Company had turned itself into a canal and railway company. It’s original idea of converting the canal to a railway was abandoned and the canal remained open. Although the railway closely follows the line of the canal from Salford to Clifton the two lines diverge there, the canal crossing to the east side of the Irwell while the railway sticks to its shelf on the west side. The railway’s origins in a canal company can still be seen in the design of the bridge over Stoneclough Road in Kearsley which is undoubtedly a design suitable for a canal aqueduct and in some of the overbridges in Farnworth.
Over the years the London & North Western and the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railways and their predecessors built a network of railways penetrating most parts of the coalfield and the coal companies themselves built a vast network of their own railways. The colliery railways not only connected to the public railways in many places but also to loading staithes on the canals. Up to the 1960s coal from collieries in the Boothstown and Walkden areas was being taken by colliery railway to Astley basin on the Bridgewater Canal Leigh Branch from where it was carried by barge to Barton power station.
The only railways left in the area now out of the hundreds of miles that once existed are the lines from Manchester to Liverpool, Wigan and Bolton.

Bridgewater Canal Extensions

	The Bridgewater Canal’s original line was for local transport of coal but a whole national transport system was in the making and the canal became part of it. There was valuable traffic to be had between Manchester and Liverpool and traffic in lime, manure and agricultural produce to and from the farming areas of north Cheshire. Then there was the potential of a reliable transport route to Birmingham, London and Bristol by way of the other canals that were proposed or under construction.
	There were two main extensions, one of them much longer than the original canal. In 1773 the canal reached Preston Brook, south of Warrington, and by 1776 it was open to its connection with the Mersey at Runcorn. At Runcorn there was a flight of 10 locks down to the river later supplemented by another flight of 10 and a short canal between the two lines near the foot. From the junction at Waters Meeting in Stretford the canal goes south westward through Stretford, Sale and Timperley to Broadheath on the edge of Altrincham. Most of this stretch can be seen from a ride on the tram from Manchester to Altrincham. The tramway is on the line of the Manchester South Junction & Altrincham railway and its stations were railway stations until a few years ago. From Broadheath the canal takes a course to the west through Lymm and Walton, where it has a picturesque stretch through Walton Gardens to Stockton Heath on the southern outskirts of Warrington. From there it passes through Daresbury to the junction at Preston Brook. The main course of the canal then is southwards through Preston Brook tunnel to join the Trent & Mersey Canal (opened throughout from Preston Brook to the Trent at Derwentmouth in 1777) at Dutton Lock. This is a stoplock having a fall of only a few inches but preserving water levels. To the right at Preston Brook is the five miles of canal to Runcorn. This length of the canal is quite close to the south side of the Mersey estuary and the Manchester Ship canal but about 100 feet higher. The terminus now is at the blocked-up arches of a bridge which was once at the head of the two flights of locks down to the river.
	The other branch opened in 1799 to join Worsley to Leigh where it meets, end on, the Leigh branch of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal from Wigan, not opened until 1820. There were only three other connections to the Bridgewater Canal. In 1804 the Rochdale Canal opened its line from Duke’s Lock immediately above the Castlefield basins through Manchester and over the Pennines through Littleborough to join the Calder & Hebble Navigation at Sowerby Bridge near Halifax. In 1838 the locks at Hulme (originally three but much later reduced to one) connected the canal to the Irwell and the last connection is the recent one near Pomona Docks to the Ship Canal replacing the route through Hulme Lock.

The Bridgewater Canal Now

	The Bridgewater Canal is still with us as part of the national system of canals despite being taken over by the Manchester Ship Canal Company in the 1890s. It was always a broad and deep canal well supplied with water unlike some of the canals that followed. It was designed and built to take barges up to 72 feet long and 14 feet wide while many inland canals were designed for narrowboats with a beam of only 7 feet. Those having a leisurely cruise in mind are fans of the 40 miles of the lock-free Bridgewater Canal - they only need to pass through 8 locks (not counting Dutton) to be in the heart of rural Cheshire at Nantwich. The original line starts at Castlefield close to Liverpool Road (the oldest railway station in the world and now the Museum of Science and Industry) and the remains of a Roman fort, goes within spitting distance of the Ship Canal, skirts the edges of Trafford Park, the world’s first industrial park, crosses the only swinging aqueduct in the world, goes under the first true inter-city railway in the world and then passes the first fully mechanised engineering works in the world (Nasmyth’s works at Patricroft - built in such a way that it could be converted to a cotton mill if heavy engineering didn’t catch on!) before reaching the entrance to the most extensive system of underground canals in the world.
	The Duke certainly started something when he decided to stay single and concentrate on his business interests.

 *     *     *     *     *

To find where some of the places are you may find these sites useful:
<http://www.old-maps.co.uk/>
<http://www.streetmap.co.uk/>
If you find the bit about the water-powered drainage scheme at Wet Earth interesting, you could do worse than try to get hold of a copy of Brindley at Wet Earth Colliery: An Engineering Study by A. G. Banks and R. B. Schofield published by David & Charles 1968