Old Canal, New Thinking...

As the Chesterfield Canal approaches its 250th birthday, there have been some interesting new ideas regarding overcoming the challenges of getting the last eight unnavigable miles reopened – involving tunnelling, building a boat lift and an ambitious opening date…

The last time we looked at the Chesterfield Canal Trust’s plans to reinstate the missing eight miles between the current limit of navigation for boats approaching from the Trent at Kiveton and the start of the isolated restored five-mile length at Staveley, two things stood out…

The first was the sheer number of new locks needed to bypass two major obstructions to reopening this length. One obstruction was Norwood Tunnel, where coalmining, the associated subsidence, and the M1 motorway had left most of the 2884-yard bore wrecked beyond repair. The Trust’s alternative plan was to restore the intact easternmost part of the tunnel, then to build a diversion climbing over the hill before descending to rejoin the original line by the old western tunnel portal – and needing between 12 and 14 new locks to achieve the necessary amount of climbing.

The other obstruction was a 1970s housing estate built on the canal in Killamarsh. Here, too, CCT’s plans revolved around a diversion with extra locks – perhaps 16 in total, descending from the Norwood direction to enter Nethermoor Lake (a former opencast mining site) before climbing back up to rejoin the original alignment continuing towards Chesterfield.

In addition, two new locks were needed to get the canal under a ‘mothballed’ freight railway near Staveley, plus one new lock to access the new basin which will form the canal’s Chesterfield terminus, not forgetting another lock already added to cope with mining subsidence when the canal was being reopened from Worksop to Kiveton in 2002. A canal which already had 65 locks in its 46 miles when it opened in 1777 might end up with near enough 100 altogether – over 80 of them crammed into the western 20 miles. A canal for hardcore enthusiasts, rather than a leisurely holiday cruise.