Summer Sunday stroll 3

Dowley Gap Lock to Bingley

[Continuing my walk from Saltaire to Bingley along the towpath of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal] 

Just beyond the locks at Dowley Gap there's a road bridge which carries the prettily named Primrose Lane over the canal. Just beside the bridge is a pub called The Fisherman's Inn, and there are a few tables on the canalside, so it's a nice spot to stop for a drink. It overlooks a winding hole, which is the term for a wider bit of canal where narrowboats can turn around if they need to. You can imagine that such long boats have to do quite a lot of forward and reverse to turn round. I once saw one try it in Saltaire, where a winding hole is marked on the map, but they had such a lot of trouble, getting virtually wedged across the canal! 

A little further along the towpath is a curious bridge, part stone and part metal, that carries a water pipe across the canal. It is part of the 32 mile long Nidd Aqueduct, which, since 1899, has brought water all the way from Scar House Reservoir in Nidderdale in the Yorkshire Dales to the water treatment works at Chellow Heights, to supply Bradford and the surrounding areas. 

The canal skirts round Bingley South Bog on its left, and enters the outskirts of the little market town of Bingley.

At this point, we are about 15 miles from Leeds and 112 miles from Liverpool - still a long way to go if you were a horse hauling a narrowboat to the docks. It's probably a good thing they couldn't read or they might just have sat down on the job!

These days our transport is so much faster and you can get a good idea of this in Bingley, where the canal, the Bingley relief road (a so-called by-pass that goes right through the middle of the town!) and the railway line all run alongside one another. In fact the canal had to be shifted sideways to make room for the bypass when it was built in 2003.

Old mills alongside the canal have been converted to apartments with some new blocks added too. They tend to leave the mill chimneys in place, as a reminder of the past.

Here there is a rather sculptural pedestrian footbridge over the canal.

A few older industrial units, garages and suchlike have been left, among newer builds like these townhouses that back on to the canal right in the centre of Bingley. I'm not sure that mill chimney will survive much longer, given the amount of foliage that has taken root in its brickwork!