Black Brook Culvert, Charnwood Forest Canal
Image by electropod Looking over some remains of the Charnwood Forest Canal near Shepshed. The former canal crossed the Blackbrook valley on a massive earthwork - at first sight from the road it looks too big to be artificial. I was mainly looking for the much photographed tunnel that now carries the Public Footpath under the embankment. I found it but my photos were hopeless. Just to the West, however, is this culvert about 1.2m in diameter that carries the Black Brook, seen here looking North and downstream from the North portal. The ill-fated canal was built to carry coal from the Leicestershire coalfields. At first it suffered from lack of water, so a reservoir was built by damming the Black Brook just to the South of this point. Completed in 1796, the dam failed catastrophically only three years later, causing much destruction but fortunately no loss of human life. After commercial failure of the canal, the Charnwod Forest Railway was later built over much the same route. If anything, it was even less commercially successful than its predecessor and soon fell into the hands of the larger London and North Western Railway (LNWR) which had been involved in its operation from the outset. On the "grouping" of the UK rail industry it became part of the London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS). It closed to passenger traffic in the 1930's and finally closed altogether in the 1960's. A modern reservoir on the site of the old one is used for water supply.
Black Brook Culvert, Charnwood Forest Canal
