Chesterfield Canal - September 2018

Near where I grew up in Derbyshire there is a canal, the Chesterfield Canal.  In its original form it ran some 46 miles from Chesterfield to West Stockwith on the River Trent which then allowed water access to the North Sea.  It was designed by James Brindley and was completed in 1777. It allowed goods and materials from the Peak District to be transported out to the Trent and thereby the North Sea and the world outside.  Among other things cannonballs were produced in Chesterfield for use in the Napoleonic Wars and stone for the building of Westminster Abbey were transported on the canal.

I have a very hazy memory from my childhood of seeing an old canal barge being pulled along by a horse but that must have been when I was very young as by the end of the 1950’s there was no commercial trade on the canal and it fell into disrepair and much of it was filled in.  

Railway Bridges near Chesterfield

Since the late 1970’s there has been an effort to rebuild the canal for leisure purposes and and there is now a 5 mile section from Chesterfield to Staveley that is restored and is navigable by canal boats.  This new section has become one of my favorite places to run - it is a great

surface and being a canal it is flat except for the odd lock.  There are some quite beautiful sections along the route and all the reconstruction work on locks and bridges has been done to a very high standard.

I ran with my phone the other day and took some photos along the way.  It is truly a treasure of the area. One day it is hoped that it will be completed all the way out to the River Trent again but the completion date keeps getting pushed back.  There is a new housing estate to be bypassed and a now collapsed tunnel to be rebored. That being said there is only 9 more miles of the original 46 miles to restore, but it is a difficult 9 miles.

There has been a resurgence of wildlife too.  In my youth everything was so polluted you rarely saw much wildlife, but now there are geese, swans, kingfishers, deer along the banks, and even fish in the canal.  

Chesterfield Church - the Crooked Spire, not too crooked from this perspective

The restoration work continues in Hartington, Staveley.

One of the interesting historical notes along the way is at Newbridge Lane between Brimington and Whittington.  Apparently in 1603, well before the canal was built, there was an outbreak of the plague in Brimington and there was a bridge at this site over the River Rother that runs alongside the current canal.  The bridge was pulled down to stop the spread of the plague.  The replacement bridge built after the plague was therefore called New Bridge.

There are more photos here.