adwuk
Active member
Not sure if everyone is aware, but the canal is being drained this winter. More details here: Crinan Canal Winter Works 2020/21 - Scottish Canals
I'm reading an OK but patchy history of the canal (by Marian Pallister) at the moment and it seems that the Dunardry flight has been in bad shape since the beginning. Partly a wartime shortage of pozzelano so they couldn't make good waterproof cement and partly good old-fashioned fraud with foundations omitted to save money. Dunardry was furthest from oversight and got the shoddiest job.The Dunardry flight is in worse shape.
That lock had that problem two hundred years ago. It's apparently the very worst built.Incidentally the schedule of the planned works referenced above makes no mention of grouting which has failed in nearly every lock, so badly at number 11 that they have been importing earth to fill the big cavities that appear as the soil is washed awayand the ground around the locks sinks ....
did the canal not go ito the River Add for a bit, before they got money to blast their way around to Crinan?The Canal was built from Ardrishaig to Crinan, The first reaches are wider and the locks are built in squared and dressed stone imported (from Arran I think) with an impressive curved inverted arched bottom, but like many major engineering projects today the money got tighter as the work progressed, later locks were lined with local rubble and the squaring and dressing deteriorated until lock 14 into Crinan basin has no lining at all. It is just a hole quarried out with minimum facing. You will have noticed, as well as the changes in the stonework, that the channel gets progressively narrower as you go west. The struggle to finance the construction may have been as plausible a reason for the state of it as deliberately shoddy workmanship. The canal failed shortly after it opened when the bank across the flat moss after Lochgilphead gave way and they had to bend the route onto more solid ground, they struggled to fund the repair.
The only major change since, both sea locks were repositioned and substantially enlarged in the first half of the last century, the originals now used for berthing were similar size to all the inland locks.
Incidentally the schedule of the planned works referenced above makes no mention of grouting which has failed in nearly every lock, so badly at number 11 that they have been importing earth to fill the big cavities that appear as the soil is washed awayand the ground around the locks sinks, I presume it is included, would be crazy if it is not. When the the canal was last drained about 12 years ago, a contractor was employed to grout the lock walls, drilling and pumping, I was building a garage and one of the workmen told me there was some left over bags of cement in a skip across the road, when I lifted the cover rather than a couple of bags the skip was full. I tried a bag but the cement for grouting was not really adaptable for building, shame tons of it was dumped but if they do not use it it does not keep.
did the canal not go ito the River Add for a bit, before they got money to blast their way around to Crinan?
i have a book somewhere that mentioned a plan to extend the canal around N shore of L Crinan towards L Awe. seems ambititious nowadays but this was before railways