Even so, the River Don Navigation was improved from Tinsley to Rotherham in 1751, but the horse towing path was not completed on this section until 1822.
Even so, the River Don Navigation was improved from Tinsley to Rotherham in 1751, but the horse towing path was not completed on this section until 1822.
On the River Avon between Stratford-upon-Avon and Tewkesbury, a towpath was never provided, and bow-hauling continued until the 1860s, when steam tugs were introduced. While towing paths were most convenient when they stayed on one side of a canal, there were occasions where it had to change sides, often because of opposition from landowners.
In more recent times, this has provided difficulties for walkers, where an attractive river-side walk cannot be followed because the towpath changes sides and the ferry is no more. Not all haulage was by horses, and an experiment was carried out on the Middlewich Branch of the Shropshire Union Canal in 1888.
The nationalisation of the canal system in 1948 did not result in the towpaths becoming public rights of way.
Subsequent legislation, such as the Transport Act 1968, which defined the government's obligations to the maintenance of the inland waterways for which it was now responsible, did not include any commitment to maintain towpaths for use by anyone, however, some ten years later British Waterways started to relax the rule that a permit was required to give access to a towpath, and began to encourage leisure usage by walkers, anglers and in some areas, cyclists.
The steady development of the leisure use of the canals and the decline of commercial traffic has resulted in a general acceptance that towpaths are open to everyone, and not just boat users. The concept of free access to towpaths is now enshrined in the legislation which transferred responsibility for the English and Welsh canals from British Waterways to the Canal & River Trust in 2012.
All text is taken from Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License .
Page generated on 2021-08-05