The longest canal in Britain, 127 miles over the Pennines from Leeds to the Mersey, past mill towns and open moor
The Leeds & Liverpool Canal runs 127 miles across the Pennines from Leeds to Liverpool, the longest canal built as a single waterway in Britain. It was begun in 1770 and took more than forty years to finish, opening throughout in 1816. It is a broad canal, engineered for the short, wide boats of the northern mills, and climbs and falls through 91 locks. For a walker or cyclist the towpath is continuous and well used, threading a changing route: the warehouses of the two cities at either end, the mill towns of Lancashire and West Yorkshire, and quiet farmed country in the middle, where the canal reaches its high ground around Gargrave and Skipton on the fringe of the Yorkshire Dales.
Its best-known structures are all on the hard central crossing. The Bingley Five Rise is a staircase of five locks that lifts boats about 59 feet in one steep flight, the finest of its kind in the country. Near the summit the canal runs through the mile-and-a-half Foulridge Tunnel, close under Pendle Hill — remembered for the cow that fell in at one end in 1912, swam the whole dark length of it, and was revived at the far portal with brandy. At Burnley the canal is carried across the town on a long, high embankment, and the descent to Liverpool includes the twenty-odd locks of the Wigan flight, above Wigan.
The canal was built to move coal, limestone, wool and cotton between the two counties and out through the docks at Liverpool, and for well over a century it was one of the busiest freight routes in the North.
Both ends are on the rail network, and the mill towns along the way have their own stations, so the canal is easily walked or cycled in stages. At Saltaire, the model village and mill beside the towpath are themselves a World Heritage Site.
