Edinburgh, Union Canal. General view of canal.

Description Edinburgh, Union Canal. General view of canal.

Date 1900 to 1930

Collection Collection of photographs by George Chrystal and Francis Maxwell Chrystal, photographers, Edinburgh,

Catalogue Number SC 786870

Category On-line Digital Images

Copy of ED 6943

Scope and Content Union Canal, Edinburgh (closed 1965 and navigation restored 2002) The canal was 11.3m wide at the surface, 6.1m wide at the bottom, and 1.5m deep. It was 50.8km long, cutting through embankments with lush vegetation and pleasant countryside on its winding route to the west. A broad towpath, designed to accommodated the pairs of horses required to draw the larger barges and fast passenger boats, followed the line of the canal bank. One of the major problems on the canal was the amount of weed which accumulated on the surface of the water in the summer. Maintenance men called banksmen were employed to remove the weed as well as other natural 'rubbish'. Many of the banksmen were former Irish 'navvies' (labourers) who had come in large numbers to help cut the canal, and who remained to work on the canal after it was finished. Two of these, William Burke and William Hare, later achieved notoriety in Edinburgh as murderers who sold the corpses of their victims to the Anatomy Department of Edinburgh University for medical dissection by the students. The Union Canal, the last of Scotland's major canals, was a commercial venture begun in 1818 and completed in 1822. It was built principally as a means of importing coal and lime into Edinburgh, and ran from Port Hopetoun in Edinburgh to join the Forth & Clyde Canal at Camelon, Stirlingshire. However, within 20 years of completion most of its passenger traffic was lost to the railways, and the Edinburgh basins closed in 1922. The rest of the canal remained navigational until 1965 when it was finally closed by an Act of Parliament. In 2002, Britain's largest canal restoration project, The Millennium Link, restored navigation, and with an extension to the Union Canal and a link with the Forth & Clyde Canal through the Falkirk Wheel, boats were once more able to travel between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

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File Format (TIF) Tagged Image File Format bitmap