Page 2.

Our walk starts at Dewsbury Canal basin, off Mill Street East. You will see the signboard "Robinsons Hire Cruisers." On entering the yard you will see many boats in and out of the water. These are mainly privately owned canal cruisers and most of them will be 'narrow,' i.e., about seven feet wide. A boat of this width and less than 60 feet long will cruise the whole of the British canal system.

The barges which operated on this canal, the Calder and Hebble Navigation were 14 feet wide and 58 feet, 6 inches long and carried up to 75 tons of cargo. They were called West Country barges and were built at various places on the navigation, the last one being the Mirfield boatyard. Boats of this size could operate on a wide range of canals and rivers in Yorkshire, and were often rigged for sail.

Looking around the yard you will see a large house in the corner. This was occupied by the Depot Superintendent until 1958 when the yard closed. The two similar houses were occupied by the stable foreman and the yard foreman when the Depot was operated by British Waterways, who took over at nationalisation in 1948. The Leggers Inn, a recent transformation, is part of the original stable block, comprising stables, sick horse stable, drying rooms and stores for boat equipment and horse fodder. At the end of the block there is a single storey blacksmith's shop, which until recently housed a small canal museum, but this has now been converted into part of the new premises.

Hopefully you will still be able to see various items of old canalia around the basin.

In the are now occupied by boat storage and car park, there stood a large wooden warehouse, demolished in 1978 as a fire hazard. The basin was developed by the Aire and Calder Navigation Company in 1876, when they bought the then derelict branch of the canal from the Savile Estate who had bought it in 1860 from the Calder and Hebble Navigation Company as part of the land they were developing in Savile Town. Looking at the first OS map issued in 1854 there are no houses or buildings in the Savile town area, as the bridge on Savile Road connecting it with Dewsbury was not built until 1862.

The basin would have been a bustling place with boats, horses and men handling all manner of goods. Barges travelled both east and west of Dewsbury, with connections to the east coast via Wakefield to the Air and Calder Navigation's port of Goole on the Humber. The Aire and Calder owned the canal from Leeds to Wakefield to Goole and believed in fighting the competition by continually improving their canals. Even today there is considerable coal traffic to power stations such as Ferrybridge.

When the navigation was opened as long ago as 1762 the canal carried on past the basin and connected with the river near to where Savile Bridge and Wickes is now. Barges passed into the river and travelled upstream, i.e., to the left past the Old Anchor alongside Watergate and then turned right into another short cut where the flood relief channel is near to the Gate Inn on Thornhill Road. It then turned right into the river by Ravenswharf to carry on towards the power station and ultimately to Sowerby Bridge, where it connected with the Rochdale Canal.

Things went well with the Canal, but upset the mill owners at Dewsbury Mills by raising the water level too high for their waterwheels. An arbitration ensued and the outcome was that the original line through Dewsbury town had to be closed and a new line built in the 1790s, which will be seen later in the walk.

The original Dewsbury Cut, where we are was cut off near to the river and the new line through Thornhill Lees came into use in 1798. The Cut was allowed to go derelict, but it came to life again in 1876 when the Aire and Calder transformed it into a new port for Dewsbury.

So our walk starts down the left hand side of the basin. We turn left but if you look right you will see the truncated canal now used as moorings. The land opposite the basin was once the Scarbro' Sawmills, and you will see the remains of their wharf further down.

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