5 minute read
hope for the Barnsley Dearne & Dove?
restoration Feature
A new group hopes to pick up where others left off on the Barnsley Dearne &
The Yorkshire Link
This piece was submitted as a ‘progress’ report – but we think it’s a bit more than that – hence the title. It’s an attempt to get things moving again on a canal which had an active restoration group for quite some years and hosted a number of WRG Canal Camps around 20-30 years ago (The infamous black Elsecar mud dug out of the basin by what became the Elsecar Heritage Centre was something of a WRG legend at the time!) but where the original group finally closed down a couple of years back.
The Yorkshire Link is a new name for the Barnsley and Dearne & Dove canals which between them formed what could be a popular through cruising route – and have some regeneration benefits for the area. But the new group are still just starting to find their way, discover what state the route is in, pick up the pieces from the earlier work, and get a feel for how feasible the restoration is, and how best to get things going again. And they’re appealing for assistance and information from anyone who can help. Iain Duncan explains...
Pictures by Martin Ludgate
Surviving bridge near Royston
A watered length near the north end of the Barnsley Canal
The Barnsley, Dearne and Dove Canal restoration was always destined to be a tricky one, but the pandemic, HS2 and several other factors stepped in to put things on hold for a couple of years. So
Help the “Yorkshire Link”!
Dove Canals. But is it feasible? And can you help? Iain Duncan asks the question...
is this a progress report? I’d like to think so, as we all know a couple of years is but a blink of the eye in Canal Time especially when most of those years were of enforced inactivity from which we are only just emerging.
But let’s step back for a moment a few hundred years and recall the legacy that has inspired the latest crew to polish their shovels and take up arms.
The Yorkshire Link, as it has become known recently, was never a greatly successful waterway. In fact it is two canals: originally the Barnsley Canal branched off as an arm of the Aire and Calder, headed South from Wakefield , past Royston and hockeysticked south of Barnsley and back up the Dearne valley heading for the coalfields and crossing the then non-existent M1 to the tramway of Silkstone, finally becoming the Barnsley Canal. Like many canals of the time coal was assumed to be the main cargo, but there were probably too many very small
Barnsley Canal: Length: 15 miles Locks: 20 Date closed: 1953 Dearne & Dove: Length: 10 miles Locks: 19 Date closed: 1961
Martin Ludgate coalfields in the area and the canal found it difficult to make money.
It was a very diversified industrial area at the time, glassmaking was a large part, Barnsley was the world’s only supplier of aerated bottles and along with processed flax, paper and corn the canal survived. It added a few extra arms as time passed, The Worsborough to supply water and the Elsecar later to supply a better coal down to Swinton.
The second canal, the Dearne and Dove , was slightly more successful, predominantly coal based, running down the Dearne valleyChallenge for the future: abutments of the missing Dearne aqueduct
from a junction with the Barnsley Canal near Barnsley to Mexborough where the Dearne feeds into the Don which then leads on towards the Sheffield Canal.
So a broad beam through route was created, but it can be assumed was rarely used as a through route as such. And because of its early collapse (often literally as there were very many small pits throughout the valley leading to subsidence) it can be assumed that it ceased operating long before any leisure boating ever made its way along the link - although I’d like to be proved wrong. And so it lay fading slowly away for 50 years until in the 1980s the first group of new navvies came along and decided it could be saved. The Barnsley Canals Consortium commissioned a feasibility study (which we are still looking for) which concluded that although expensive it could be done and (together with the Aire & Calder and Sheffield & South YorkNovel use for former mooring ring, in what’s now a supermarket yard shire navigations this page 18
Yorkshire Link could create a broad beam one week long cruising circuit that would help to bring prosperity to the region.
So now we are back at my current progress report. I will continue in note form since I think this is the best way to explain the ‘blink of an eye’...
1: Study concludes Link is feasible 2: Consortium estimates it will take 30 years 3: Loss of key stakeholders leads to closure of the Barnsley Dearne & Dove
Canals Trust and transfer of assets elsewhere 4: New team supported by the Inland
Waterways Association’s West Riding branch and Yorkshire & North East
Region emerges, contacting local authorities, engaging with partnerships, growing the team, learning about how to renovate canals! 5: Search for detailed recent history of
BDDCT commences. Who and what did they do?
This is the very start of our ‘dig’. I am sure many of you have many cake-inspired tales to tell, of bottled Elsecar grime, (no we don’t want it back), of pleasant days looking for remains of the canal heritage maybe.
That is the stage we are at – We have to find out what still exists and if the feasibility study is still feasible, before we invest too much shovel time. We know there were several areas of canal still in water in Google Earth time, but we now have to go walk the walk in real “Let’s build as many ill-considered houses and empty warehouses” time.
The Canal route was protected in the interested local councils’ LRF plans a few years ago and we are asking if that is still the case: judging by some developments we have seen, it has not been honoured by any of the councils.
If any WRGies can help in any way please contact me at duncan@waterways. org.uk or Ian Moore at west.riding@ waterways.org.uk
Iain Duncan
Martin Ludgate Half-buried stonework of one of the Walton flight of 12 locks
