Harecastle Tunnel
Local highlightA canal tunnel more than a mile and a half long under Harecastle Hill, its water stained orange by iron
Harecastle Tunnel carries the Trent & Mersey Canal beneath Harecastle Hill at Kidsgrove, north of the Potteries. It is really two tunnels side by side. The first, engineered by James Brindley, was begun in 1766 and opened in 1777 after eleven years’ work; at 2,880 yards it was for a time the longest canal tunnel in the country. It was built with no towpath and barely room for a boat, so crews had to “leg” through, lying on their backs and pushing against the roof with their feet, a job that took about three hours.
By the 1820s Brindley’s narrow bore had become a bottleneck, and Thomas Telford drove a second, wider tunnel alongside it, opened in 1827 and built in only three years. Telford’s is the one still in use; Brindley’s, subsided and unstable, was long ago closed to traffic. The water runs a strong orange throughout, stained by iron leaching from the surrounding ironstone rather than by anything added.
Boats pass through under supervision, with a tunnel-keeper and a ventilation system to clear engine fumes over the long, still passage. There is no towpath, so walkers cannot follow the canal underground; the path goes up and over the hill instead, past the sealed south portal of Brindley’s tunnel, which can be seen from the Kidsgrove side. The tunnel and its portals are listed. Stoke-on-Trent lies a few miles south along the canal.
