the works were formally commenced by Josiah Wedgwood on the declivity of Bramhills, in a piece of land within a few yards of the bridge which crosses the canal at that place. Brindley was present at the ceremony, when due honours were paid him by the assembled potters. After Mr. Wedgwood had cut the first sod, many of the leading persons of the neighbourhood followed his example, putting their hand to the work by turns, and each cutting a turf or wheeling a barrow of earth in honour of the occasion. It was, indeed, a great day for the Potteries, as the event proved. In the afternoon a sheep was roasted whole in Burslem market-place, for the good of the poorer class of potters; a feu de joie was fired in front of Mr. Wedgwood's house, and sundry other demonstrations of local rejoicing wound up the day's proceedings.

Wedgwood was of all others the most strongly impressed with the advantages of the proposed canal. He knew and felt how much his trade had been hindered by the defective communications of the neighbourhood, and to what extent it might be increased provided a ready means of transit to Liverpool, Hull, and Bristol could be secured; and, confident in the accuracy of his anticipations, he proceeded to make the purchase of a considerable estate in Shelton, intersected by the canal, on the banks of which he built the celebrated Etruria the finest manufactory of the kind up to that time erected in England, alongside of which he built a mansion for himself and cottages for his workpeople. He removed his works thither from Burslem, partially in 1769, and wholly in 1771, shortly before the works of the canal had been completed.

The Grand Trunk was the most formidable undertaking of the kind that had yet been attempted in England. Its whole length, including the junctions with the Birmingham Canal and the river Severn, was 139 miles. In conformity with Brindley's practice, he laid out as much of the navigation as possible upon a level, concentrating the locks in this case at the summit, near Harecastle, from

which point the waters fell in both directions, north and south. Brindley's liking for long flat reaches of dead water made him keep clear of rivers as much as possible. He likened water in a river flowing down a declivity, to a furious giant running along and overturning everything; whereas (said he) "if you lay the giant flat upon his back, he loses all his force, and becomes completely passive, whatever his size may be." Hence he contrived that from Middlewich, a distance of seventeen miles, to the Duke's Canal at Preston Brook, there should not be a lock; but goods might be conveyed from the centre of Cheshire to Manchester, for a distance of about seventy miles, along one uniform water level. He carried out the same practice, in like manner, on the Trent side of Harecastle, where he laid out the canal in as many long lengths of dead water as possible.

The whole rise of the canal from the level of the Mersey, including the Duke's locks at Runcorn, to the summit at Harecastle, is 395 feet; and the fall from thence to the Trent at Wilden is 288 feet 8 inches. The locks of the Grand Trunk proper, on the northern side of Harecastle, are thirty-five, and on the southern side forty. The dimensions of the canal, as originally constructed, were twentyeight feet in breadth at the top, sixteen at the bottom, and four and a half feet in depth; but from Wilden to Burton, and from Middlewich to Preston-on-the-Hill, it was thirtyone feet broad at the top, eighteen at the bottom, and five and a half feet deep, so as to be navigable by large barges; and the locks at those parts of the canal were of correspondingly large dimensions. The width was afterwards made uniform throughout. The canal was carried over the river Dove on an aqueduct of twenty-three arches, approached by an embankment on either side—in all a mile and two furlongs in length. There were also aqueducts over the Trent, which it crosses at four different points one of these being of six arches of twenty-one feet span each-and over the Dane and other smaller streams.

The number of minor aqueducts was about 160, and of road-bridges 109.

But the most formidable works on the canal were the tunnels, of which there were five-the Harecastle, 2880 yards long; the Hermitage, 130 yards; the Barnton, 560 yards; the Saltenford, 350 yards; and the Preston-on-the Hill, 1241 yards. The Harecastle tunnel (subsequently duplicated by Telford) was constructed only nine feet wide and twelve feet high ;* but the others were seventeen feet four inches high, and thirteen feet six inches wide. The most extensive ridge of country to be penetrated was at Harecastle, involving by far the most difficult work in the whole undertaking. This ridge is but a continuation of the high ground, forming what is called the "back-bone of England," which extends in a south-westerly direction from the Yorkshire mountains to the Wrekin in Shropshire. The flat county of Cheshire, which looks almost as level as a bowling-green when viewed from the high ground near New Chapel, seems to form a deep bay in the land, its innermost point being almost immediately under the village of Harecastle; and from thence to the valley of the Trent the ridge is at the narrowest. That Brindley was correct in determining to form his tunnel at this point has since been confirmed by the survey of Telford, who there constructed his parallel tunnel for the same canal, and still more recently by the engineers of the North Staffordshire Railway, who have also formed their railway tunnel almost parallel with the line of both canals.

When Brindley proposed to cut a navigable way under

* Brindley's tunnel had only space for a narrow canal-boat to pass through, and it was propelled by the tedious and laborious process of what is called "legging." It still continues to be worked in the same way, while horses haul the boats through the whole length of Telford's wider tunnel. The

men who "leg" the boat, literally kick it along from one end to the other. They lie on their backs on the boat-cloths, with their shoulders resting against some package, and propel it along by means of their feet pressing against the top or sides of the tunnel.

this ridge, it was declared to be chimerical in the extreme. The defeated promoters of the rival projects continued to make war upon it in pamphlets, and in the exasperating language of mock sympathy proclaimed Brindley's proposed

tunnel to be "a sad misfortune,"† inasmuch as it would utterly waste the capital raised by the subscribers, and end in the inevitable ruin of the concern. Some of the small local wits spoke of it as another of Brindley's "Air Castles;" but the allusion was not a happy one, as his first

The smaller opening into the hill on the right-hand of the view is Brindley's tunnel; that on the left is Telford's, executed some forty years since. Harecastle church

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and village occupy the ground over the tunnel entrances.

† 'Seasonable Considerations,' &c.; Canal pamphlet dated 1766.

"castle in the air," despite all prophecies to the contrary, had been built, and continued to stand firm at Barton ; and judging by the issue of that undertaking, it was reasonable to infer that he might equally succeed in this, difficult though it was on all hands admitted to be.

The Act was no sooner passed than Brindley set to work to execute the impossible tunnel. Shafts were sunk from the hill-top at different points down to the level of the intended canal. The stuff was drawn out of the shafts in the usual way by horse-gins; and so long as the water was met with in but small quantities, the power of windmills and watermills working pumps over each shaft was sufficient to keep the excavators at work. But as the miners descended and cut through the various strata of the hill on their downward progress, water was met with in vast quantities; and here Brindley's skill in pumping machinery proved of great value. The miners were often drowned out, and as often set to work again by his mechanical skill in raising water. He had a fire-engine, or atmospheric steam-engine, of the best construction possible at that time, erected on the top of the hill, by the action of which great volumes of water were pumped out night and day.

This abundance of water, though it was a serious hin derance to the execution of the work, was a circumstance on which Brindley had calculated, and indeed depended, for the supply of water for the summit level of his canal. When the shafts had been sunk to the proper line of the intended waterway, the excavation then proceeded in opposite directions, to meet the other driftways which were in progress. The work was also carried forward at both ends of the tunnel, and the whole line of excavation was at length united by a continuous driftway-it is true, after long and expensive labour-when the water ran freely out at both ends, and the pumping apparatus on the hilltop was no longer needed. At a general meeting of the Company, held on the 1st October, 1768, after the works had been in progress about two years, it appeared from the