180 History of Inland Transport 



Aire ; and (3) an aqueduct carrying the canal over the 

 Shipley valley. The total length of navigation was 127 

 miles, with a fall from the central level of 525 ft. on the 

 Lancashire side, and of 446 ft. on the Yorkshire side. The 

 entire work of construction extended over 41 years, and 

 the total cost was i, 200,000. 



The effect of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal on the in- 

 dustrial districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire was no less 

 remarkable than the effect of the Grand Trunk Canal on the 

 industries west or south of the Trent. When the Leeds and 

 Liverpool Canal was formed there was, as Baines observes 

 in his " Lancashire and Cheshire," not one town containing 

 10,000 inhabitants along the whole of its course from Liver- 

 pool to Leeds. With the improved facilities afforded for 

 the conveyance of raw materials and manufactured goods 

 from or to the port of Liverpool came a new era for the textile 

 trades all along the route of the canal and the now busy 

 and well-populated towns of Wigan, Blackburn, Nelson, 

 Keighley, Bradford and Leeds are indebted in no small 

 degree for their industrial expansion to the better means of 

 communication which the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, in 

 the days when railways were still far off, opened up to 

 them. 



Still another canal that was made in order to establish a 

 line of communication west and east, and to serve important 

 intermediate districts, was the Rochdale Canal, which starts 

 from Manchester, rises by a succession of locks to a height 

 438 ft. above the Manchester level, and, fed on the hill summit 

 by some great reservoirs, descends to the river Calder at 

 Sowerby Bridge, the point from which that river is navigable 

 to the Humber. 



Connection with the Calder, and thus with the cross- 

 country navigation of which it formed a part, was also 

 obtained by means of the Huddersfield Canal, a waterway 

 twenty miles in length which, starting from Ashton, rises 

 334 ft., to the Saddleworth manufacturing district (situate 

 in the wildest part of the Yorkshire hills), passes through a 

 tunnel three miles long, and descends 436 ft. on the Hudders- 

 field side in reaching the level of the Calder. 



The reader will have concluded from these references to 

 other canals that, although the Duke of Bridgewater had 



