The Leeds and Liverpool Canal is Britain's longest inland waterway. Begun in 1770, it was soon superseded by the railway, but is much used today by pleasure craft. The start of the walk is on the towpath at Bingley and begins with a diversion to visit two impressive pieces of canal engineering: the stepped Three Rise Locks and Five Rise Locks, where boats passing along the canal rise or fall 60 feet (18 metres) over a distance of 320 feet (98 metres).
From the locks, you retrace your steps past Bingley and continue on to Dowley Gap. At first you pass a varied mixture of old and new warehouses and factories, but soon it becomes a typical Pennine valley with the River Aire, canal, road, and railway cutting side by side. Yorkshire's wool trade was given a boost when the road from Keighley to Kendal was made into a turnpike in 1753, making it easier for wool to be brought from the sheep-rearing areas of north-west England to the industrial West Riding of Yorkshire.
After a short diversion from the towpath into beautiful Hirst Wood, the walk returns to waterside bedecked with alder, rowan, hazel, beech, elder, and sycamore, with canal banks thick with meadowsweet, ramsons, dog-rose, yarrow, and butterbur.
At Saltaire, the great stone-built mill of Sir Titus Salt spans the canal. Opened with much ceremony on Sir Titus's 50th birthday in 1853, it covers 25 acres and has an ornamental chimney 250 feet (76 metres) high, built in a Venetian Gothic style intended to resemble an Italian palace. The magnificent Congregational Church opposite the mill — the burial place of Sir Titus and his family — is in the Italian Classical style, and further up the road to the south the Victorian Hall has an impressive façade featuring two stone lions at the front reputedly made for Trafalgar Square but proven too small (followed further on by Sir Titus's almshouses and the hospital).
Robert's Park, on the other side of the canal, is another example of early town planning. A splendid bronze statue of Sir Titus Salt was erected in 1903 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth; it stands on a plinth decorated with an angora goat and an alpaca, symbols of the wool industry on which the Victorian philanthropist built his very considerable success.
The route heads uphill to Shipley Glen on the edge of Baildon Moor. Should it be open, the Shipley Glen Tramway saves some of the uphill climb: open cars are hauled by cable 386 yards (353 metres) up a 1 in 12 incline beneath overhanging trees. The tramway, built in the 19th century by local man Sam Wilson, was restored to operation in 1982 by the Bradford Trolleybus Association.
Shipley Glen is a typical Pennine gill, or ravine (see my Shipley Glen walk 1 and Shipley Glen walk 2). On the moor there is a thin layer of acid soil between outcrops of bare millstone grit supporting heather, bilberries, sheep's sorrel, soft rush, and tough grasses grazed by sheep and well-trodden by people.
From Shipley Glen a woodland path brings you out into Gilstead, a suburb of Bingley. On the walk downhill towards the canal, there are good views over Airedale, where rural and industrial areas co-exist side by side — typical of West Yorkshire.
Acknowledgment: Text derived from the Out and Out Series; Discovering the Countryside on Foot. Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia.
