Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
winter wildfowl on Stanford Reservoir. The site of Downtown Village is on the left bank in
front of the reservoir.
The canal crosses the River Avon and the Northamptonshire-Leicestershire border on an
aqueduct. Views in the North Kilworth and Welford directions are extensive at what is close
to the country's watershed. The River Avon flows westwards while the headwaters of the
River Welland flow eastwards from just east of the canal. The River Avon is closely followed
by the Welford Branch, which was built as a feeder from Welford, Sulby and Naseby reser-
voirs but has a lock and carried up coal and brought down lime. It was disused from 1938
until restored in 1969 and is a popular destination for narrowboats.
North Kilworth had the first wharf on the canal, receiving coal from the Warwickshire
and Derbyshire coalfields. Anglo Welsh have a boat hire base here. The canal heads into a
wooded cutting. St Andrew's 12th century church in North Kilworth is noted for its Jacobean
Armada pulpit of Spanish oak.
Husbands Bosworth Tunnel is 1.1km long. This time the horse path is rather more obvious
as it climbs over a hill, crosses the A5199 and winds over a footbridge across the former rail-
way. Perhaps this is as well as there are fewer spoil heaps along the line of the tunnel for
guidance. This tunnel also has a ghost, reports of which being very useful for keeping away
strangers who might have sought work legging the working boats through.
The canal emerges into a cutting below Husbands Bosworth. All Saints church has a 14th
century spire and there is a Georgian Bosworth Hall, partly from the 16th century, which
hosts Husbands Bosworth Festival with traction engines and much more.
Foxton is one of the most fascinating points on the canal system. It starts where a tall lock
keeper's cottage overlooks the top of the lock flight. There are two staircases of five locks
with a passing place in the middle, the largest example of staircase locks in Britain. Built
1812, they drop the canal 23m from the summit level. Although they had side ponds to save
water, they caused a tremendous bottleneck for traffic, so an inclined plane was added. Based
on the one at Blackhill on the Monkland Canal, it had tracks at 1:4 and could carry wide-beam
traffic, unlike the lock flight. It had two tanks, each 24m x 4.6m and 1.5m deep, weighing
220t apiece, balanced by wires passing round a single steam-powered winding drum. This
was the last steam-powered lift. The tanks were immersed in the canal at the bottom but at the
top they were pushed against hydraulically sealed doors by hydraulic rams. The levelling of
the incline for the top tank was to counteract the reduction in load as the bottom tank became
buoyant.
The plane saved 230m
3
of water per passage, 90 per cent of what was normally used, and
reduced passage time considerably; from 70 minutes to 12 minutes. However, it was uneco-
nomic because there was not enough traffic and it closed in 1910 after just a decade of use.
The plane's boiler room now contains the Foxton Canal Museum, including a working model
of the plane. The locks, lock keeper's cottage and junction distance post are all Grade II lis-
