Any Ideas Where?

[BroadAmbition]

Fascinating

Griff

[wombat nee blownup]

No, its narrow enough for the boat to look after itself. You can get off and take your photos, or if really scared go in the cabin!
The water is actually the full width of the aqueduct with the towpath suspended over it, so you are not pushing against a narrow gap even if you are going upstream (there is a flow on the Llangollen as it supplies drinking water from the Dee at Horseshoe Falls down the canal to a reservoir near the bottom).

Google?


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[RS2021]

1 minute ago, wombat nee blownup said:

Google?

Not this time.

A picture I took of Horseshoe Falls to prove it!

[RS2021]

The bridge in your photo leads to what is now a dead end and some basins. However, it was originally intended to be the main line of the canal to Chester, they only constructed the canal from Ellesmere down to Hurleston instead when they ran short of money. The canal from Trevor to Llangollen which really gives the canal such a special destination was only constructed as a navigable feeder to get water from the Dee, hence it is very narrow in places. It was never intended to be busy.

[webntweb]

What we know today as the Llangollen canal has quite a complex history. As RS201 says the canal at one time was planned to head north west from Trevor towards Chester.

The bridge numbering is not straightforward. Bridge number 1 is at the Hurleston end of the canal where it joins the main line of the Shropshire Union. When the canal gets to Welsh Frankton and the junction with the Montgomery canal (at bridge 69) the numbering continues to the left on the Montgomery with the first bridge number 71 (don't know what happened to number 70).

Continuing straight on on the Llangollen the bridge numbering starts again as 1W (west). I think the first few bridges used to have W after their number but possibly not today.

The bridge in Wombats pic is number 31 which looking at the picture has the Pontcysyllte aqueduct immediately to its left and Anglo Welsh's Trevor boatyard to the right.

Just to confuse matters if you carry on through the boatyard you pass under footbridge 29 and then bridge 30 (which is almost identical to bridge 31 but built on a slight slope) then you reach the dead end that RS201 mentions.

The website below has a really good explanation of the history of the "Llangollen canal". I don't know how to link to it but if you copy and paste into Google it should be the first website listed.

https://www.plaskynastoncanalgroup.org/canals/

[oldgregg]

4 hours ago, RS2021 said:

 The canal from Trevor to Llangollen which really gives the canal such a special destination was only constructed as a navigable feeder to get water from the Dee, hence it is very narrow in places.

You're not kidding! That last bit is one-way and the part where you go round the back of the houses into the actual basin you're just scraping along the bottom of the canal for much of it.

The basin itself is quite decent, bizzarely.

[webntweb]

20 minutes ago, oldgregg said:

The basin itself is quite decent, bizzarely.

The basin was only opened in 2006, the entrance being the site of the old winding hole.

Before the basin was dug out you would have to navigate through the two one-way sections, past the online moorings at Llangollen and if there were no moorings available (quite common through the summer), return the way you had come.

Just after the first one-way section there was a straight stretch before Llanddyn No 2 lift bridge where you could moor, but that in effect turned that length into a one way section – although you could just about squeeze two boats through by stopping and "handing" past each other.

[oldgregg]

Ah, that makes sense. It did look quite new.

We went in early June and it was a challenge then - We did think it would probably be absolute chaos in the summer.

Cool waterway, though, and the flow from the bypasses on the locks makes lining the boat up a lot more challenging than on other canals.

[ranworthbreeze]

5 hours ago, oldgregg said:

Ah, that makes sense. It did look quite new.

We went in early June and it was a challenge then - We did think it would probably be absolute chaos in the summer.

Cool waterway, though, and the flow from the bypasses on the locks makes lining the boat up a lot more challenging than on other canals.

The first three locks can be a bit of a trial and lining up is best done with plenty of revs on until the bows are in the entrance of the lock, then it is a case of full reverse to slow down the boat.