Cutting across the countryside

A narrow cutting is no place to meet a boat – so we did

It's been said many times before but it still merits saying again: this Shropshire Union Canal is a ruddy engineering masterpiece.
Mind you, as it was built by someone who'd already got the Menai Bridge, Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and Caledonian Canal in his portfolio, it was very probably a bit easy-peasy.
Thomas Telford didn't so much build his canal across the Shropshire landscape as rip the landscape up to suit his canal as it charged in an almost straight line northwards from the Black Country to Cheshire.
Nigh on two hundred years ago he tore the scenery apart in a series of deep cuttings and massive embankments to create his level line. And you almost get the impression that the curmugeonly Scotsman viewed locks as an irritation, keeping them to an absolute minimum and clustering them together so they could be despatched speedily wherever possible.
We've reached Market Drayton, 27 miles up the canal and only used six locks (aside from the tollkeeper's little one at the start of the waterway).
But we have been through some spectacular works of civil engineering. The mile long Shelmore embankment took over five years to build, the treacherous soil constantly slipping away. Remember we're talking men with shovels and picks, soil moving by horse and cart. JCBs and earthmovers weren't even a dream. Hell, even decent roads were a rarity and railways little more than a dream.
The embankments spreadeagle the countryside, though there are only glimpses through the trees of it far below. The claustrophobic cuttings, sheer sided and gloomy with damp, dark green trees and runners are far more atmospheric.

High Bridge rears out of the greenery

Traversing the narrow mile of the Woodseaves Cutting is like being in The African Queen. The jungle-like foliage crowds right in – for much of its length there isn't room for two boats to pass – and even though the towpath has been expensively and impressively repaired, I wouldn't like to venture along it on a gloomy evening.

In the cuttings trees appear to grow right out of therock

In the middle of it all the damp red sandstone arches of a high bridge (prosaically called High Bridge) that seems to go from nowhere to nowhere rear out of the greenness. In some future age, when canal travel has been forgotten, a traveller hacking though the forest could come upon this and think it a feature of some lost empire. Which I guess, it is.

After the cutting is a brief moment of sunshine at the elegant buildings of Tyrley Wharf before we plunge down five locks, the last two of them carved right out of the sandstone. Then the canal, a murky red slurry of sandstone silt now, runs on to Market Drayton.

The old Cadbury wharf at Knighton is still home to boats

Market Drayton, an ancient but now rather dishevelled town, is the only one along the length of this rural canal. And the only other intrusion into the rural idyll is at Knighton where a well hidden Cadbury's factory produces 'powdered products' –  Angel Delight, Birds Custard Powder, and catering size Smash packs. Once it produced chocolate crumb for the Bournville factory and a fleet of narrowboats ferried milk and chocolate along the canal as recently as 1961. The wharf survives with a cluster of enthusiast owned working boats moored there are as a nostalgic reminder of its past.
I don't think Thomas Telford would have cared much for nostalgia though I hope he'd be impressed that his fine engineering had stood the test of time.