BILL McAllister: Telford the 'Colossus of Roads' was a dab hand at canals too!
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THERE is a stone tablet embedded in a wall at 5 Clachnaharry Road, beside where the Caledonian Canal offices were until 30 years ago, with a poetic tribute to Thomas Telford’s enduring achievement.
This memorial was erected in 1922 to mark the canal’s centenary and the poem is by Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate whose collaborations with Coleridge and Wordsworth saw them named “the Lake Poets”.
Master engineer Telford, a shepherd’s son, and Southey seemed unlikely friends. But in Dumfries-shire, local lady Elizabeth Pasley introduced young Tam to poetry and fired his enthusiasm for literature.
He wrote some verses and in 1819 he and Southey embarked on a Highland tour. Southey wrote a miscellany called The Doctor in 1834 and one of the folk tales he included was The Story of the Three Bears. This was the first published version of the Goldilocks tale which every child now knows.
Telford, a pioneer of using iron in bridge building to create lighter, less chunky structures – like the Menai Suspension Bridge – also introduced new drainage methods in his extensive roads network, leading to Southey nicknaming him the “Colossus of Roads”.
In 1820 Telford created and became first president of the Institute of Civil Engineers. Three years earlier, the Courier reported that a sloop and a barge, laden with coal, had sailed on a historic voyage from the new Muirtown Basin to Fort Augustus. “The novelty soon attracted a vast concourse of all ranks and ages; the banks were literally lined with spectators”.
A month later, in November 1817, the newspaper revealed that in deepening the canal channel in Loch Dochfour, the dredger had dragged three huge trees from seven feet of water and, below that, ten feet of gravel. “One of these is of a magnitude altogether beyond the ordinary growth in this country; it is in circumference 20ft….and 14ft 2in at the root end. One of the limbs is 8ft 11in in circumference and the three trees measure 198 solid feet”.
In June, 1820, The Comet, Henry Bell’s new steamship, generated considerable interest at Muirtown; it would later ply the Inverness-Glasgow route.
On October 23, 1822, the canal was opened when the steam yacht Loch Ness, accompanied by two sloops, set off from Muirtown Locks on the first journey through its full length. Cannon were fired as a huge crowd cheered them off.
The Courier reported: “The banks of the canal were crowded with spectators, a great number of whom accompanied the party from Muirtown Locks to the Bridge of Bught. The band of Inverness-shire Militia went on board at Dochgarroch Lock and immediately played the national air of God Save The King.
“In passing Dochfour, the steamer fired a salute which was answered by a round of firearms and loud cheering.”
Those on board the Loch Ness on its two-day journey to Corpach included MP Charles Grant, Provost Robertson of Aultnaskiach, Bailies Simpson, Cumming and Smith, Mr Inglis of Kingsmills, Mr Fraser of Lovat and canal engineer Matthew Davidson.
On January 9,1823, the first Royal Navy vessel, The Cherokee, entered the canal and lay in Muirtown Basin. In July that same year, a steamship named Malvina was built at Kinmylies and launched in Muirtown.
The canal had taken 19 years to complete. While it was being built, ships had become bigger, too large for many to use it, while the French naval threat, a reason for an alternative to the Pentland Firth crossing, had vanished. But it carved a new trade route, people and goods moving more quickly and safely across the country. Today it is a major leisure asset for cruise vessels, rowers, kayaks and the like, attracting 500,000 visitors a year.
Southey’s Clachnaharry tribute begins: “Now over the deep morass sustained, and now across ravine or glen or estuary, opening a passage through the wilds, subdued”.
It ends: “Telford it was by whose presiding mind, the whole great work was plann’d and perfected”.
Telford, who died in 1834, is buried in Westminster Abbey, far from the banks of his Highland legacy.
n Sponsored by Ness Castle Lodges.
