Llangollen Canal

Can anyone help?

The Llangollen canal was one of the first to use a bitumen or asphalt lining way back in 1857. It was re-lined 100 year later in 1957. Does anyone know or have recollections of who carried out the work? Or even any pictures..

Yes I know it's a long shot. Request arrived through my father who is involved with the Motorway Archive.

 

It's the canal itself. The normal method was to use clay to seal the waterway but a use was found for bitumen and it was tried on the canals, the first one was the Llangollen canal. Thanks for the info.

 

Just at the moment reading LTC Rolts book "Landscape with Canals" Unfortunely just too early to help with your question although he does mention the amounts of clay puddle used as you say. This canal was built as a feeder to the main canal (which never got any further towards its intended destination) which expalins the sharp bend near the end of the Aqueduct and the narrow size of the canal....

 

Aswell as the Horseshoe falls to Llangollen section being only 18 inches / 2' deep...

 

Just quickly scanning through some of the standard works like Hadfield and Paget-Tomlinson,and Rolt on Telford, I cannot find any reference to what the poster has mentioned, but when you read in detail about Pont Cysyllte where Telford used a cast-iron trough, I wonder if that is were bitumen was used?

I vaguely recall something on the box a few years ago about the aforsaid aqueduct where the joints on each section of trough were sealed with something like tar and..was it sheeps wool or cotton fabric ? something strange anyway!

Incidentally if the OP is doing some research, you perhaps need to use "Ellesmere canal" as it was called.

Edit: Having had a Google around, the joints on the cast iron trough were originally sealed with flannel and white lead and iron filings, nowadays maybe the "flannel" survives, but not the white lead! I suggest that it is likely that it was this trough on the aqueduct that had a bitumen coating. I cannot see bitumen or asphalt being used on the ordinary puddled clay canal banks. It aint gonna stick!!

 

Came across this recently, although I know it's not the LLangollen but does answer 46118s post above.

Recent restoration of the 1797 Wendover arm of the Grand Union Canal in England has revealed one of the earliest uses of asphalt as a waterproofing liner. Following excessive leakage, a length of 4·4 km of the arm was lined in 1857 with coal tar asphalt as an economic alternative to repuddling with clay. However, within 13 years the canal was leaking as before and eventually closed in 1904. As this paper reports, the failure appears to have resulted from use of an excessively rich lining mixture and poor construction practice plus damage from boats, ice breaking and earth movements. It was nevertheless a novel, if ultimately unsuccessful, approach to repairing a seriously leaking canal economically and constituted a significant step in the use of asphalt for hydraulic engineering.

Dave B

 

Thanks for that, interesting.
Without straying too far away from the OP's question, does anyone have a view as to the best book around that actually explains how the canals were originally built? The standard history works on canals are the Charles Hadfield books, but they tend to be more about "why" they were built, ie the commercial need and the surrounding politics. There is some information in the Paget-Tomlinson "Illustrated History of Canal and River Navigations", but I suspect you have to look to individual canal engineer biographies, ie on the likes of Jessop Rennie and Outram to find out more about the original construction work. These biographies tend to be rather expensive now, usually secondhand. However admittedly I havn't looked at the Rolt books in detail, they are in the "waiting to be read" pile!!

Any thoughts please?

46118

Edit: Just partly answering my own question, "The Canal Age" by Hadfield, does have a whole chapter on Engineering and Construction, and "The Inland Waterways of England" by Rolt provides an insight into construction of engineering features on canals. Mercifully both these books are quite inexpensive on Amazon or Abe.