A disused railway in Derbyshire is being turned into a canal

One of my favourite stretches of canal is the five miles from Cromford to Ambergate in Derbyshire's Derwent Valley. I first came across it in 1977, which was when our English teacher had wangled the funds to take his A level set on a field trip to D.H. Lawrence country and we camped beside the river at Whatstandwell.

At that time those five miles of canal were in navigable condition and the Cromford Canal Society ran popular horse-drawn trips along them. But round about 1990 the society broke up in the midst of a scandal whose details I cannot remember and the canal returned to desuetude.*

It has since been taken over by the trust that looks after Arkwright's Mill at Cromford,** and improvements are being made.

But when those five miles are fully restored, the Cromford Canal will still be cut off from the main inland waterways system. Because Ambergate is nearly 10 miles from Great Northern Basin, which marks the other end of the Cromford Canal.

Great Northern Basin is at Langley Mill in Derbyshire and is the start of the Erewash Canal, which is navigable all the way to the Trent at Long Eaton - I have visited the other end of it at Trent Lock there.*** A disused portion of the Nottingham Canal that joined the surviving stretch at Lenton in the city began there too - there were so many canals there because of the lucrative coal traffic.

A start at restoring the first mile or so of the Cromford Canal out of Great Northern Basin is being made. As this video explains, there are considerable challenges in this: part of the route has been lost to a road scheme and opencast mining.

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The solution is to dig a new route for the canal, making use of an old railway track. Importantly, the track has a bridge under the new road because trains were still running along it when the road opened.

This is great news, but there are still formidable obstacles to be overcome if the whole of the Cromford Canal is to be restored. Chief among them is the partially collapsed Butterley Tunnel.

If you are interested in this canal and the prospects for its restoration, there are a couple of posts on this blog with videos that may interest you:

• Walking the length of the Cromford Canal
• Uncovering the secrets of the Cromford Canal

* hem hem

** I've blogged about my proposal before. As the years go by, it looks more and more reasonable.

*** I like the picture at the top of that post so much that it's the wallpaper on my laptop.