The Rochdale Canal is a broad canal with bridges and locks wide enough to allow vessels of 4.3 m (14ft) width. The canal runs for 51 km (32 miles) across the Pennines from the Bridgewater Canal at Castlefield Basin in Manchester to join the Calder & Hebble Navigation at Sowerby Bridge in West Yorkshire.
The Rochdale Canal was conceived in 1776, when a group of 48 eminent men from Rochdale raised £237 and commissioned James Brindley to conduct a survey of possible routes between Sowerby Bridge and Manchester.It was not until 4 April 1794 that an act was obtained which created the Rochdale Canal Company and authorised the construction of the canal.
Because of its width, it was more successful than the Huddersfield Narrow Canal and became the main highway of commerce between Lancashire & Yorkshire. Cotton, wool, coal, limestone, timber, salt and general merchandise were transported. In 1890 the canal company had 2,000 barges and traffic reached 700,000 tonnes a year, the equivalent of 50 barges a day. Due to declining traffic,it closed in 1952.
With the growth in leisure boating, a campaign was mounted for its re-opening. The first section to be restored was the nine locks between the junction with the Ashton Canal and the Bridgewater Canal, as a result of the Ashton Canal reopening in 1974. The Rochdale Canal Society was formed, and worked hard both to protect the line of the canal and to begin the process of refurbishing it, concentrating on the section from Todmorden to Sowerby Bridge. Nearly 26 km (16 miles) was opened in this way, with the section from Todmorden to Hebden Bridge opening in 1983, and the entire eastern section up to the summit opened by 1990. However the reopened section was still isolated from the canal network.
The next success was a re-fashioned link with the Calder and Hebble Canal (which had never closed) at Sowerby Bridge, which joined the restored section to the national network in 1996. On 1 July 2002, the restored sections joined up with the never-closed section in Manchester, thus re-opening the canal to navigation along its entire length.
As originally built, the canal had 92 locks. Whilst the traditional lock numbering has been retained on all restored locks, and on all the relocated locks, the canal now has only 91 locks. The former locks 3 & 4 have been replaced with a single deep lock (Tuel Lane Lock), which is numbered as 3/4. Tuel Lane Lock is in Sowerby Bridge and with a fall of 6 m (19 ft 8½ inches) , it is the deepest lock in the United Kingdom - all movements are controlled by a lock keeper.
By road: On A6139 in Sowerby Bridge.
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