At Harecastle the canal is carried under the hills that separate Cheshire from Staffordshire by a tunnel nearly three thousand yards long. At first the boatmen pushed their barges through the tunnel by 'legging' along the roof. This was such a laborious and troublesome way that another engineer named Telford, the great road-maker, afterwards built a second tunnel large enough for horses to tow the barges through it.
The Ellesmere Canal connects the estuaries of the Dee and the Mersey, and thus cuts off the Wirral peninsula from the rest of the county. When this canal was being made, layers of fine sand and sea shells were found, proving that at some not very remote period the estuaries of the Mersey and the Dee were connected with one another.
In the east of Cheshire the Peak Forest and Macclesfield Canal enters the county at Dukinfield. One portion goes southward to Macclesfield and the other crosses the river Goyt at Marple by an aqueduct a hundred feet above the river. The Shropshire Union Canal connects the Dee and the Severn; and thus all the great rivers of the north midlands, the Mersey, Dee, Severn, and Trent, are united with one another by this network of Cheshire canals.
The canals proved a blessing not only to the coal owners and manufacturers, but were also used by the people of the country villages in order to travel from one part to another. Passenger barges called 'fly-boats' enabled the country women to take their butter and cheese to the market towns.
James Brindley was a man of humble birth, and for several years worked as a labourer on a farm, amusing himself in his spare moments with making wooden models of machinery with a pocket-knife. He was so clever that he was often called in by the mill-owners of Macclesfield and Congleton to repair their machinery. When he was first employed by the Duke of Bridgwater he was paid only half a crown a day. He was a very practical man, and gained his knowledge not from books but from his own experiments. When he was called to the House of Commons to explain his scheme for carrying a canal over the Mersey, which many people laughed at as absurd, he took with him a Cheshire cheese which he cut in halves to represent the arches of the bridge, and made a complete model of his proposed work which greatly amused his audience, and at the same time proved that he was well able to overcome his difficulties.
The rivers also were dredged and made suitable for navigation wherever possible. An artificial channel was made for the waters of the Dee which had become choked with silt and sand, and small ships could once more be towed as far as Chester. The Weaver was made navigable from Winsford to the Mersey, so that salt, which was taken out of the earth in ever increasing quantities, could be taken to Runcorn in barges at a much smaller cost than on wagons.
Salt is necessary in every home for cooking and other household needs. But still greater quantities are required for alkalis and other chemicals, the making of which is the chief occupation of the workpeople of Runcorn and Weston Point. Thousands of tons are also exported every year to other countries where salt is scarce.
Salt has been worked in the towns on or near the Weaver from Roman days. The earlier way was simply to mine it as we do coal now. Some of the mines at Northwich cover many acres, and when lit up by electric coloured lights are very beautiful. The roof of a mine is held up by columns of salt which are left in position for that purpose, but they frequently give way and the buildings above them are wrecked.
The coarser kinds of rock-salt are still taken out in lumps. You may often see pieces in the Cheshire fields which farmers have put there for cattle to lick. For salt contains health-giving properties, and salt-mining is not injurious to health as coal-mining is. Brine baths have been made at Nantwich for people suffering from certain diseases.
In the Middle Ages, wells or brine-pits were sunk and the water carried in leather buckets to the salt-houses. Edward King, a Cheshire historian, who in the seventeenth century wrote a book called Vale Royal, says that 'at Northwich there was a salt spring on the bank of the River Dane, from which the brine runneth on the ground in troughs of wood until it comes to the "wich-houses", where they made salt. Some old leaden salt-pans may still be seen at Northwich, pieces of charcoal still sticking to them on the under side, showing that the brine had been heated over wood fires.'