Five chambers climbing in a single flight, the steepest lock staircase in the country, on the canal at Bingley
Bingley Five Rise is a staircase of five locks on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, lifting boats about 59 feet in a single unbroken flight. It is the steepest staircase of locks in Britain, at a gradient of roughly one in five. A staircase differs from an ordinary flight in that the chambers share their gates: the bottom gate of each lock is the top gate of the one below, so there are no stretches of open water between them and a boat passes straight from one chamber into the next.
It opened on 21 March 1774, the work of the engineer John Longbotham, as the canal was pushed through from Gargrave towards Leeds. A crowd said to number thirty thousand turned out to watch the first boats descend. The structure is Grade I listed and still worked much as it was built, though a resident lock-keeper is on hand to guide boats through, since the staircase is easy to flood or drain in the wrong order. A shorter Three Rise staircase stands a little further down the same pound.
The locks are freely accessible on foot at any time; there is nothing to pay and no gate. The towpath runs right alongside, giving a clear view of the whole flight from top or bottom, and boats pass through daily in the season. Bingley has a station on the Airedale line, and the canal here is an easy walk downstream to Saltaire and its mill, or up towards Skipton. Leeds and Liverpool lie at either end of the waterway itself.
