The Leveson-Gower family had a long involvement with canals. In 1758, Granville Leveson-Gower, who was Earl Gower and later 1st Marquess of Stafford, was one of the men who commissioned a survey of part of the route of a possible Trent and Mersey Canal, before his brother-in-law’s Bridgewater Canal was constructed. The Earl was soon the figurehead of the Trent and Mersey for its proposal, 1766 Act of Parliament, and construction – ensuring that the Duke of Bridgewater did not favour the rival Weaver Navigation and giving confidence to other investors. When the Duke died childless, his vast investments added to the wealth of the Marquess’s son, who eventually became the 1st Duke of Sutherland, but the Bridgewater properties left the senior line of Leveson-Gowers due to the terms of Bridgewater’s will. Nevertheless, the Leveson-Gowers made significant further investments in canals passing through Shropshire and Staffordshire, and created some local canals themselves.
We highly recommend Waterway Routes’ Shrewsbury and Newport Canals Map to understand the routes and connections of the abandoned canals in the area. Many of the canals made use of inclined planes to lift short tub boats with wagons on rails, powered by steam or by the descent of heavier wagons going downhill. Inclined planes reduced the need for flights of locks in an area with insufficient supply of water to service the canal locks lifting boats up and down. (Every time a lock raises or lowers a boat, water moves downhill and downstream, and has to be replaced higher up in the canal network.)
These local canals crossed or served the Lilleshall Estate:
- Newport Branch of the Shropshire Union Canal opened in 1835 and ran from Norbury Junction to Wappenshall Junction on the Shrewsbury Canal. It crossed Kynnersley Drive with an aqueduct in Aqueduct Plantation on the Weald Moors, and nearby the Humber Arm ran southeast to Lubstree Wharf and then a private railway carried goods from the Donnington Wood Canal.
- Shrewsbury Canal ran from Shrewsbury to Trench and was opened in 1797. The company bought a length of the 1788 Wombridge Canal to link the Shrewsbury Canal from Trench to west end of the Donnington Wood Canal.
- Donnington Wood Canal was completed in about 1767, running from the family’s coal mines in Donnington Wood through the Lilleshall area to Pave Lane on the turnpike road to Newport. It was linked to the national canal network via the Shropshire Union’s Newport Branch, both via the Wombridge and Shrewsbury Canal, and the railway to Lubstree Wharf on the Humber Arm.
- The Shropshire Canal was a short canal which opened in 1792 and ran south from Wrockwardine near the junction of the Wombridge and Donnington Wood Canals, connecting to them with an inclined plane to avoid the need for a large flight of locks. It ran south to the Ironbridge Gorge, descended via the Hay Inclined Plane (now part of Blists Hill Museum), and then connected to the River Severn at Coalport.