Days 11, 12, and 13 - Worcester and Birmingham Canal - Worcester to Druids Heath

The Worcester and Birmingham (W&B) canal links the two cities, built to connect the River Severn in Worcester to the Birmingham Canal System via a quicker route than the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, although opposition from other canals prevented completion of the last few feet of canal in Birmingham for twenty years.

Worcester and Birmingham Canal

The W&B travels through some very pleasant countryside, climbing from the Severn through rolling fields and wooded cuttings and slicing through a hilly ridge south of Birmingham.

Stoke Flight of Locks

On this section of our journey we will encounter four tunnels, (Dunhampstead, Tardebigge, Shortwood and Wast Hill Tunnel). The longest of these is Wast Hill Tunnel at 2.49km passing underneath the Birmingham suburb of Hawkesley (near Kings Norton Junction).

Wast Hill Tunnel heading towards Birmingham

Steam tugs were used from the 1870's to haul strings of narrowboats through these four tunnels.

Wast Hill Tunnel - Southern Portal

The W&B is also our most strenuous canal as far as locks is concerned with 58 locks over a distance of just 40km consisting of the Offerton, Astwood, Stoke and Tardebigge flights.

Eleanor in Lock No. 50 looking west down the flight

The most famous of these is the thirty lock flight (over a 3.6 km stretch) at Tardebigge. The locks fill and empty very quickly so we managed to get through them all in an (energetic) afternoon (including assisting a single hander just ahead of us)!

Tardebigge Flight - between Locks 50 and 51

The top lock has a rise of 3.4m, unusually high for a single lock. It was built to replace an experimental vertical boat lift. The canal company was concerned with the expense of the 58 locks needed to take the canal down to the River Severn.

Tardebigge Top Lock and Lock Keeper's Cottage

The Tardebigge vertical lift was invented by John Woodhouse and built between 1806 and 1808, comprising a counterbalanced 72 ft x 8ft cassion which weighed 64 tons when full of water. It was suspended on 8 sets of rods on chains which were looped over 12 ft diameter cast iron wheels connected to a single axle.

Tardebigge Vertical Lift

Access and exit was via four guillotine gates - very similar to those seen on the Anderton Boat Lift.

Anderton Boat Lift Guillotine Gates

This rather unusual structure was short lived but in truth was something of an engineering success. It could be operated by two men with a passage time of just 2.5 minutes. At its peak it moved an impressive 110 boats in a 12 hour period. Whilst technically successful, the canal owners were sceptical and called in Scottish civil engineer John Rennie for an expert opinion. He concluded that there were too many moving parts and high maintenance costs could be expected. In the event nature intervened and the lift was damaged on a cloudburst in 1815 and it was promptly replaced with the current lock.

At our overnight stop at Tardebigge we walked through the adjacent field to the nearby St Bartholomew’s church.

St Bartholomew’s Church, Tardebigge

 The ‘commanding position’ where St Bartholomew’s church now stands may have been a sacred site for a thousand years or more. The evidence for this is no more than circumstantial, but still intriguing. The ancient yew trees (often associated with religious sites) that stand either side of the entrance to the church grounds, are believed to be over a thousand years old. And it’s been suggested that the unusual name ‘Tardebigge’ has origins in the Saxon for ‘big tower’ or ‘tower on a hill’.

English Yew (Taxus baccata) in St Bartholomew’s grounds

What may be more reliable is an eighteenth century account of the history of St Bartholomew’s. It describes the church, as it was then, as having been built around an original structure possibly dating from just after the Norman Conquest in 1066.

Diglis Basin - commencement of the Worcester and Birmingham Canal

From 1841 railway competition took away much of the business from the W&B and in 1868 losses were so severe that a receiver was appointed. The canal was saved by being bought in 1874 by the Sharpness New Docks Company (which by then owned the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal).

London & Birmingham Railway Locomotive No. 32 heading a mixed train circa 1937

Under enterprising management new traffic was sought, and the canal survived until nationalisation in 1948.

Artists impression of narrowboat trade at Cadbury's Bourneville Wharf

The last commercial traffic was coal from Cannock to Worcester and chocolate crumb from Worcester to the Cadbury factory at Bourneville in Birmingham, ceasing in 1960 and 1961 respectively.

Transferring raw materials from narrowboat to train waggons at Bourneville

These English canals are a time-warp with very little changed since they were constructed over two-hundred years ago. I, for one, will never loose sight of the fantastic engineering achievement made principally by the early civil engineers such as Brindley and Telford and the skills in bridge, tunnel and lock building by the early 'Navvies'..... occasionally in the middle of a long dark tunnel for example you realise that the thousands and thousands of bricks lining the wall were placed by human hand risking their lives working in dangerous darkness. Following the ghosts of thousands of working boats through the centuries you are just a nano-second in the timescale of canal history that I hope will exist for ever.

Finally today's lock statistics for the Worcester and Birmingham canal to Kings Norton Junction:

Bilford Flight (2) - Climb 4.3m
Tibberton Flight (6) - Climb 12.8m
Astwood Flight (5) - Climb 12.8m
Stoke Prior Flight (6) - Climb 13.0m
Tadebigge Flight (30) - Climb 66.1m

That's it for today. Moor to come real soon.

The Skipper.