A Cold Day by the Canal

I've reverted to black and white. I have loads of black and white negatives and as I came to the end of scanning a file of colour negs I thought I'd have a change and whittle a few out of the black and white collection.

These go back to a cold day in November 1978 when we had gone visiting Fran's parents and took her mother out for a ride in the car. We ended up at Marple in Cheshire where I wanted to take some photos of the canal. The canals of England have a special interest and affection in the hearts of fishermen, walkers, countryside lovers and boating enthusiasts these days but their original purpose was to provide a quick method of transporting goods during the Industrial Revolution. As towns turned into larger cities not only was there need to move goods out of the city, but food and raw materials needed to be brought into the cities.

The canals changed the shape and nature of the country. Not only was England now criss-crossed by canals but it had to cope with large numbers of immigrants who had come into the country as cheap labour to help dig the canals - which of course, in those days meant digging with spades. You can imagine the freedom of movement it opened up. Journeys that took days over rough ground, bumping along over rutted roads on the unsympathetic springs of a stagecoach could now be taken in the comfort of a barge travelling over the calm smoothness of water.

Some innovative ways were thought up to solve some of the problems. Here the canal comes to a T-junction. The tow path - for horses towing a barge on a long rope - approaches the junction on the right but the horse of any barge wanting to turn left needs to cross the canal. If the horse were to cross a bridge and then carry on in the same direction the rope would pass over the bridge whilst the barge needed to pass under. So the path over the bridge was built into a spiral so that the horse could cross the canal and then pass under the bridge with the barge in tow without the rope getting snarled. The building of the canals was an undoubted engineering marvel. Yet within less than a lifespan, they were obsolete. As steam power was discovered, the coming of the railways meant that the movement of goods in bulk soon became possible by rail and the canals were already in decline.

Here from that same day and canal path are Fran and Gillian, who was just 19 months old!

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