Eighteen quiet miles from the Potteries into the Churnet Valley, one of the prettiest branches in the Midlands
The Caldon Canal is a branch of the Trent & Mersey Canal, leaving it at Etruria Junction in Stoke-on-Trent and running 18 miles out to Froghall, with a separate arm to the town of Leek. It has 17 locks, beginning with the Etruria staircase, and a couple of short tunnels. Despite starting in the middle of the Potteries, it is one of the best-loved cruising waterways in the country for the scenery it reaches.
It opened in 1779, built to bring limestone down from the quarries at Cauldon Low to the kilns and furnaces of the industrial Staffordshire Potteries. The Leek branch was added later, and for a century the canal was busy with stone, coal and ironstone before, like most, it fell quiet when the railways came. It survived closure, was restored in the 1970s, and is now navigable throughout again.
The reward comes in the second half. Below the town the canal enters the wooded Churnet Valley, one of the quietest and most enclosed river valleys in the Midlands, where for a stretch near Consall the canal and the River Churnet share the same channel. The valley is thick with oak woodland, and the canal shares it with the preserved Churnet Valley Railway, whose steam trains run alongside the water.
Both ends are easy to reach: Stoke-on-Trent has a mainline station near Etruria, and the towpath runs the whole way to Froghall Wharf. The canal is popular with walkers and with hire boats making the there-and-back run down into the Churnet and back to the Trent & Mersey.
