Exploring the Forbidden Manchester Ship Canal

yeah this is exciting now um i honestly didn't think i could get this far i honestly didn't get this far look at that bridge look at it how exciting is that come on come on this is exciting right i'm currently lost in a in a jungle right i'm calling it quits unfortunately um i got down to somewhere on that bend there um quite a way down but it was just it just kept going this these brambles and nettles and ferns up to here and the trouble is i just don't know how far it's going to be like that so it's my fault i'm coming in the height of summer um but anyway i'm going to call it quits there [Music] uh oh hi everyone good to see you good morning um well i'm back out on the narrow strip of causeway between the manchester ship canal on the river mersey um and i made it i made it past that a bit the jungly bit around runcorn runcorn jungle um i made it past that yes and i tell you what it was about ten percent easier last time i attempted it in the height of summer so um yeah brilliant it's pretty early in the morning um the sun is kind of rising in a cloudy sky but i'm here and um i feel like i'm a bit i'm through it now and it should be kind of clear going ahead so i'm up as it runcorn docks which is just over there the entrance to run conducts it's not very big but it's the first site on the trail today and then we've got a lock coming up the second lock um in this stretch that i'm walking today so let's crack on the manchester ship canal is a 36 mile long waterway in the uk linking the ports of manchester and salford to the sea over the mersey estuary one of the last canals built in britain is also the only canal allowing large sea going vessels to leave the coastline and travel inland one of the largest feats of engineering in the world from the late 19th century period it became a busy waterway with docks at various places along its length and a major reason the north west was able to keep thriving as the 20th century unfolded in the last 40 years traffic on the canal has become a rarity yet it remains a much loved goliath of history with its many viaducts locks and some epic scenery flanked by heavy industry and farmland accessing the ship canal can be challenging but this section here between runcorn and its endpoint at eastern lux has only ever really been used by dock workers and farmers it's also the only stretch of the ship canal still in frequent use the lack of a public footpath along this length implies a lack of permissible access to it which let's face it is a bit of a legal gray area but since i was a kid i've always looked at maps and wondered what it'd be like to walk along this narrow wall and out onto the grassy norman's land so finding no signs telling me not to today i've set out to actually take a look right so this is the lock um i guess it's a bit of a dumping ground for the peel holdings or whoever owns this um yes bit of a missile there but look at these two lock gates i'm 99 sure they're locked gates um just float in there absolutely fantastic uh the lock down there has been um sealed off uh and it's just full of junk old crane there big tires um so a bit of a dumping ground this lock um but it's nice to see some boats and some ongoing industry over there uh so yeah let's move on um and it's a bit of a walk now to the next point of interest yes so uh just a big pile of junk um but you can see the old lock gates there barely still there um and the rest is completely sealed up with silt and mud um and this thing here look at this this is cool this doesn't turn by the way uh but look at that [Music] go on we're looking here while we can so a little hot on the lock um very very interesting but there's nothing in here um unfortunately it's an old fireplace there and a bit of a hole in the ceiling it's got a good view though you might notice um a near constant sound of geese honking away um i'm sorry about that in the background there um there's literally hundreds and hundreds of them just walking around swimming in the canal working on the mud um it's gonna be the soundtrack to my day although to be fair i'm the one intruding on their territory so it's not their fault so not him now actually starting to feel excited now um i wasn't before um was a bit i just didn't think i'd get this far again so i have done and i'm starting to sink in it's quite exciting it's a long while though i can see it unfold um down the mersey uh history ahead of me and um it's a bloody long way away run everybody loves runcorn it's where chemicals come from and everybody likes chemicals [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] okay so come to a bit of an interesting point now this is western point over there um and just up there where the twinkly lights are that is the very end of the weaver navigation um which runs all the way parallel with the ship canal down there for a few miles anyway so that's the last point of it um and also the um run corner westin canal is back there as well the end of it you notice there's a church there now that is christ church and it's um an abandoned church it's not in use anymore um it was built in the 1840s and it was next to the river mersey which is actually over there used to be on the banks of the river mersey um but then they built the canal behind it and they built the ship canal in front of it um and cutting it off onto an island and apparently it was the only church in britain on an uninhabited island um it's not in use anymore though um unfortunately and the only access point is through the port of western uh so it's not accessible to the public so we swing around here you can see i don't know if i can get all of that the river mersey goes that way like that and liverpool it's over there it's not it's not like you can see liverpool for me liverpool burkina the ship canal goes like this now it heads south it swings south so i'm gonna have to follow that obviously um round runcorn um past the lovely chemical plants over there um and two well let's see let's see what's happening [Music] [Laughter] [Music] just the same and they've got windmills in the sea and they've got the chemical factory when you pass this place by night it's better than black blue lights it's wrong everybody [Music] everybody loves chemicals right so i thought i'd start for a little bit and actually look at the scenery i've been all hot and bothered this morning just trying to power through this thing and i realized i'm not actually stopping to look around and then i got here the third lock and by far the most interesting lock so far because of these things look at them there's about six five or six old lock gates just huge massive things a lot bigger in real life than they look on the camera um just leaning against the lock here and i'll be going that way obviously i'm south but then my walk takes me that way eventually to the north west um so it's a bit of a whip like that up towards eastern locks i wonder if it can get that way that far it's a hell of a walk i can see it from here it's a long long way many many miles um taking us past the wind turbines over there and then i've got to turn around at some point and go back on myself because there's no way off that way eastern locks is private it's there's high security there um so there's no crossing point there's no little dinghy or ferry i can just jump on across the water and go back the main way so i've gotta go back on there gotta go back on myself so we'll see how far we can get we might not get that far um but yes this is exciting now now i've stopped and going ah i just breathed this is exciting now i'm proper i'm excited foreign i mean look at the size of these things they're just huge massive and there's more than six as well there's a few more for the down i've just seen um yeah amazing [Music] [Music] everybody loves chemicals the dock here at runcorn dates back properly to the coming of the bridgewater canal where a series of locks took boats down to the mersey it made sense to build a dock here which opened in 1791 meanwhile boats on the weaver navigation sometimes had to wait days to access the mersey at good tides until 1807 when the western canal was cut allowing them to travel to western point the construction of the ship canal here in the late 19th century spurred a mini revival but runcon's real development came thanks to the ethel fleder railway bridge in 1868 opening up the town to heavy industrialization its proximity to the cheshire salt fields and the coastline made runcorn an ideal place for the development of chemical works which grew to be a large part of the local economy and even today heavy industry surrounds the town on its watery sides so the next stop along this wonderful causeway is this brown building over there um and some of the area around it that is a western point power station and it's built in the 40s or 50s i'm not sure um to power the industry around here it's uh defunct now it's not in use anymore but it's slap bang in the middle of this massive chemical works which stretches a mile or two down the side of the uh canal or the the river weaver um it's just huge huge and that's going to dominate the scene for the next um half an hour for me anyway but i'm not going to stay here the next point i want to look at is just there and that's even more interesting so this is the weaver slu skate um and it obviously lets water out of the canal and the river weaver because the canal the weaver join up here and into the mersey um to drain um and there's ten gates there i think only eight of which actually work but this is a proper um bit of engineering along this car which still obviously operates [Music] so it's slowly starting to brighten out a little bit um it's still a bit of a cloudy day anyway this part here this is frogsham virtually this is where the river weaver uh the weaver navigation the canal and the manchester ship can now all come together at this point here so it's very wide the water here that bit up there's the the revo weaver um heading towards cheshire um so yes over here is uh the wind farm um owned by peel um again and it's one of the largest onshore wind farms in britain i'm not sure how many turbines there are though to be honest uh i might count them as i go past but yeah interesting nice and green from here on so yes a very different landscape now the junction of all these waterways at this point probably explains what this little concrete bunker is next to the sluice gates apparently it's a second world war relic something to do with anti-aircraft facilities right so it's it's completely opened up now um it's it's no longer a narrow strip of of causeway to walk along it's this wide open field it's just a field i'm standing in now between the ship canal over there and the river the sheep there's loads of sheep i think this technically must belong to the farm over there um just on the other side of the canal but yeah this is actually why i've the main reason i've always wanted to come down this stretch um between the ship the car on the river not because of the industrial side over there although that is interesting but i've always seen this bit on maps and just thought like what is this wedge of land which is just inaccessible between one body of water and the other like i don't know nobody really comes down here and i just found that fascinating the canal bends around that way as does the the side of the river the widest point of the river mersey is just further up there we'll get to that in a bit hopefully and over there you can see the other bank of the mersey over there it's bloody miles away now you can see hale lighthouse the little lighthouse at hale and over there um the airport the john lennon airport speak um but yeah what a strange place to come [Music] oh that's what you want to see in here a ship on the ship canal oh caress easy now [Music] [Music] okay so it's been a bit of time since i last spoke to camera and i've put a fair few miles behind me um it's 11 o'clock now so i set off at half six this morning so what's that about four and a half hours um so yes not too bad but it's just been a bit of a constant slog um so and it's been quite featureless as well since i spoke to you and just a few abandoned buildings little huts and things and quite a lot of dead sheep and foxholes but actual foxholes not second world war foxholes um so yeah but the view has opened up amazingly now you can see over there um liverpool cathedral the old cathedral there that sort of tower and then the rest of the mersey history new gesture and then down there um you can see again once more the um the bridge at runcon so you can kind of see the journey i've come on so far um but yeah it's getting a bit cold um i think it's because i'm hungry to be honest with you so i'm gonna sit here get a bit of food down my neck and then we're gonna crack on and the next stop possibly the last stop of the day is just down there stan low island loads of history on stanley island um and it looks like a bright red ship on the other side of the ship canal so that's really exciting so yeah let's get some grub so this behind me is the river gallery which uh flows from the other side of the ship canal goes under the ship canal and then out uh to drain into the mersey over there you've got um the refineries of this part which is stanlow we're not far from ellesmere port now by the way so there's loads of refineries around here um but what i want to look at now is this island this bit of land here with all the vegetation all the trees on that the other side the river that is stanlow island um and there was a 12th century cistercian abbey on there very remote abbey on this remote um bit of land next to the mersey um so it was built on the 12th century about 100 years later the tower fell and there was a fire and so the most of the monks abandoned it and moved somewhere else into lancashire but a few of the monks stayed and they stayed here for quite a while until the 16th century actually when king henry viii dissolved all of england's monasteries so in the 18th century a small farmhouse was built in the ruins of the old abbey and with the coming of the ship canal came the need for some extensive ducks here and four cottages were built to accommodate dock workers and their families the island was also home to an unknown number of cats and dogs that had escaped from ships the island is only being accessible by ferry boat from the refinery making life there quite a unique experience for the handful of its residents however in the 1980s the houses were demolished all that remains on the island today outside of the security fence around the docks are some disused buildings an old workshop some rusty old tanks a water tower and an old police station amongst them the rest of the island has been reclaimed by nature engulfed by high brambles and is a special spot for rare birds [Music] so i'm just walking along the edge of the island now it's actually impenetrable as you can see um all over um so i'm just hoping if i keep going there'll be a way in there and i can walk properly on stanlow island okay so this is stanlow point the very northern tip of stanlow island i've just walked all the way around um i've walked down there a little bit as well um and it's just impenetrable there's so much just overgrowth on there and it's all the spiky horrible nasty stuff which you just can't battle through so i've attacked it here there and everywhere it's not happening anyway so i thought i'd call it quits here um where i can see this amazing view so down there is stan low docks with a big ship there um the refinery a cooling tower that's quite cool and then the the manchester ship canal keeps going um all the way past that lump over there which is mount monastery and um it goes to eastern locks where it enters the river mersey finally the end of the manchester ship canal but i'm not gonna go that far i'm gonna stop here mostly because there's not much to see that way and it's still quite a long uh distance to cover so besides eastern locks and the only other crossing point of the ship canal is still an active lock and there's loads of security around there so i'm not just going to roll up and go hello can i cross over please because that's not going to happen is it so i'd have to go back anyway so i'm not going to bother with that there's not much to see don't worry about it so what i'm going to do is have a cup at sea on the stanlow point here um and look at this view liverpool over there and then all the way over to runcorn where i started this morning where i'm gonna end later on today hopefully um so yeah that is the walk ahead of me and you know what it's been a fantastic day it's been a great day i've always wanted to come down here and i can't believe i've done it i might not have got on stanley island properly but just doing this walk and going and seeing the things i've seen has just been amazing for me so yeah i'm really really happy with it what can i say this is a challenge complete for me tic um so yes thanks for joining me on it [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so as i'm heading back past the third lock now you can see the river mersey is in full flood behind me it wasn't this morning it was all the way over there um so it's just i made a beautiful end to the day and the sun's coming out as well so beautiful um but yeah let me just say this has been an absolutely epic little adventure i'm so glad i did it i don't think i'll do it again i don't think i'll do it again but um i'm sure i'll remember it for the rest of my life so yeah uh what a day well worth it there were 19 wind turbines by the way 19 just in case you're wondering you

Channel: Bee Here Now

Views: 99,567

Keywords: history of manchester, manchester history, british history, working class, industrial revolution, martin zero, abandoned, railway history, urbex, historic railways, northern history, manchester ship canal, ship canal, runcorn, stanlow island, stanlow, ellesmere port, stanlow abbey, river mersey, weaver sluice gate, river weaver, walking tour

Id: cxPF9csoQic

Length: 27min 15sec (1635 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021