Caledonian Canal

200 years since grand opening

THE Caledonian Canal was originally promoted as an alternative safe passage for shipping to the treacherous routes and rough seas of the Pentland Firth and around Cape Wrath.

It would also provide employment after the Highland Clearances throughout the Highlands and reduce attacks from French privateers on Royal Naval warships.

James Watt first surveyed a route in 1773. Construction was authorised in 1803, when Thomas Telford and William Jessop were given the job of resurveying and building the canal.

Originally expected to take seven years to complete, at a cost of £ 474,000, the canal was finally opened in 1822 with great celebration. As traffic increased, steamboat passengers were able to complete the return journey between Glasgow and Inverness in only six days.

The 22 miles of canal had taken 12 years to construct and the cost had almost doubled to £ 910,000. During this time the threat to British shipping from the French had disappeared, after Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Only one-third of the canal is man-made, the remainder formed by the naturally occurring lochs in the Great Glen, a geological fault line slashing through the Highlands: lochs Dochfour, Oich, Lochy and the best- known Loch Ness. There are 29 locks (eight at Neptune’s Staircase at Banavie), four aqueducts and 10 bridges.

Like all canals, traffic declined after the Second World War but, unlike its Lowland cousins, the Caledonian was never officially closed to navigation. The canal is a major draw for visitors to the Highlands and transited by leisure boaters, fishing boats, holiday hire and hotel boats and Royal Navy patrol boats.

Transit begins and ends at the sea locks in Inverness and Corpach, where navvies had to dig the canal basin out of solid rock. The great flight of locks at Neptune’s Staircase is a draw, overlooked by Ben Nevis, Scotland’s highest mountain, and from where you can enjoy the sight of steam and diesel trains crossing the Banavie Swing Bridge on the West Highland railway line between Fort William and Mallaig.

Fort Augustus, halfway between Inverness and Fort William, hosts a flight of five locks taking boats down through the village into Loch Ness.

Clachnaharry Sea Lock giving access to the Beauly Firth in Inverness, at the northern end of the Caledonian Canal.

PHOTOS: JONATHAN MOSSE Corpach Sea Lock, near Fort William reached by water from Loch Linnhe. The Great Glen Way, a coast-to-coat walking route runs between here and Inverness.