Montgomery Canal Restoration

Restoration Update

We finally have another half mile of canal in water!  The official filling ceremony took place on 8th October, with the stop plank lifting being witnessed by the local press, Radio Shropshire and BBC Midlands Today.  Mind you I think the reporter enjoyed her trip on Barry Tuffin’s boat more, as he had the starring role!  The towpath was re-opened on 19th October, so the whole works can be viewed by members of the public.  We are currently in the final clearing up and adding hydraulics to the lift bridge.

More good news on the channel restoration is that we will be getting an additional £200,000 from the European Interreg project, which we will be using towards extending the channel works on towards Price’s Bridge, a further 400metres.  The additional money will not complete this section, but will meet more than half the costs.  The funding has become available due to under spend in some other parts of the overall European project which BW lead.  So an indirect thank you to Hainault in Belgium and Apeldoorn in the Netherlands! 

To meet European requirements the funding has to be spent by the end of March, and that includes bringing forward the extension works to Aston Nature Reserve, which we had been planning to undertake next spring.  So I will have my work cut out for the next few months!

Chris Smith has been ploughing through large numbers of contracts and tenders, and works are under way on a major towpath improvement from Llanymynech to Carreghofa locks.  In the longer term we hope that this will also link in to a major restoration of the Vyrnwy Aqueduct.  Other planned improvements include work on the towpath south of Welshpool, at Berriew, and the connections through to Newtown.

The Vyrnwy Aqueduct works have been included in an Interreg bid submitted by a French lead partner, who are working on the restoration of the Sambre-Oise Canal.  If it comes off, (a very big if) it is likely to generate around £800,000 of grant funding.  So that expenses paid trip to speak at a conference in Lille may have been worth it!  It will be several months before we hear about the project, but if successful should enable major works to proceed as the aqueduct is within British Waterways’ own arrears programme. 

Meanwhile we need some money to continue the good work beyond next June.  In the absence of any Russian millionaires, we are interviewing for a fundraiser / fundraising service tomorrow (at time of writing).  We will need more engineering studies and suchlike in due course, but the decision at the last business planning round was that money was the main factor holding back the restoration, and that has been the area we have decided to invest in.  The path will never be smooth, but we will do our best to maintain the momentum.

Stephen Lees, Project Manager, Montgomery Canal Restoration