Lost canal

I really like canals. One of my ancestors was known as 'The Standedge Admiral' and was the traffic regulator on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal from 1811 to 1848. His father - and mother - helped to dig the canal. So perhaps it's in my blood.

Canal towpaths were my route to exploring Birmingham and Coventry, and now I'm rediscovering Nottingham.

The other day I decided to try to trace the route of the Nottingham Canal through the outskirts of the city. Most of the canal was either closed or incorporated into other waterways by WWII. Several miles are now a nature reserve which make a pleasant country walk. I headed the other way.

The end of the canal at SK503395.

Heading East, the route goes through an area known as Balloon Woods, once the site of some of Nottingham's possibly undeservedly notorious high-rise slum clearance housing, which were in their turn demolished some years ago. Balloon Woods were also a location in the film 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' It all seems very innocuous now, but there is little sign of the canal through a weedy sycamore woodland.

Just a puddle underneath the railway line.

Then it - sort of - appears again.

This path through an estate goes exactly where the canal was. (Haven't I got long legs!) Then it disappears again, possibly incorporated into the backgardens of Yalding Drive. No sign of it for nearly a mile, despite the roads apparently following the route it took. Over the Trowell Road and onto Torville Drive with its' accompanying Dean and Bolero Closes. That dates the estate neatly to the mid-eighties! Torville Drives' elegant curves could be following the old canal route, or equally a tribute to the road's name.

If this is the canal then it's a shame - just a rubbishy channel behind the gardens. What a wasted opportunity.

Then I go round a corner and find this:

An old 'winding hole'. Or two, even: there is what looks like another through the trees, connected by the remains of a lock.

This seemed like a good point to stop exploring and head off for the bus home. It was getting even more chilly and dusk isn't the time for even an innocuous-looking person like myself to start looking into people's back-gardens. The canal route seems to carry on between back gardens. It turns south and goes through what was factories and is now the University of Nottingham's Jubilee Campus where I spent a lot of time last year. The Campus is based on a long, wide water feature... I wonder where they got that idea... Finally the canal reappears, as part of the River Leen.