Horses of the Cut By Charley Snowdon
‘It wasn’t so much the steam engine that created the industrial revolution as the horse that brought the coal to the fire in the first place…’
Our canal system in Britain dates back to the mid -18th century where it played a vital role of transporting goods due to the start of the industrial revolution.
“The roads simply couldn’t handle such weights and the vehicles needed to move these heavy and newly in demand materials, just didn’t exist”, explains local historian and canal enthusiast John Lovell. “At walking speed a horse could move fiſty times as much weight in a boat as it could with a cart, that’s about one hundred times its own body weight!”
The canals soon became the answer to not only moving heavy objects, but also fragile ones. Pottery for example, fared much better from the smooth journey afloat than it did trying to survive the bumpety bump of the horse drawn cart on old fashioned roads. This efficiency equation of linking the load to the animal and moving it with minimal friction across flat, still water, is what inspired the birth of our canal systems and what kept them going for a century and a half thereaſter.
By 1840, there were nearly 4,500 miles of canals due to ‘Canal Mania’, where those who had the means to invest, had readily ploughed their cash into nearly every canal project in the country. This surge in canal building echoed demand and with that the increased need of true horse- power. The canals, animals and the people that worked them had proved to be the main spring of Britain’s power housing emergence as the first industrial nation.
So called the ‘cut’, due to their incision in the land, the canals were reliable and regular and some even worked on strict advertised timetables. The canals were a huge improvement on both road and river traffic but, as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and it was the railways that eventually forced the canals to tighten their belts aſter having reined supremely profitable for more than half a century.
“Navigable cuts and canals are of great and general utility; while at the same time they frequently require a greater expense than suits the fortunes of private people.
” Adam Smith 1776
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