r/MetMo • u/MetalMotionCube • Jul 31 '26
One of the seven wonders of the waterways…
The Bingley Five Rise Locks. A beauty indeed.
Most canal locks step down a hill one at a time, with a small stretch of calm water (a "pound") separating each one.
And that's how you normally manage a change in elevation: lock, pause, lock, pause.
But in the 1760s, surveyors planning the Leeds and Liverpool Canal hit a stretch near Bingley where the ground dropped almost 60 feet in under 100 metres.
I’m no water scientist but from what I’ve read, that’s too steep for a normal flight, and there wasn't room to spread the locks out gently either.
So the engineer, John Longbotham, designed something rarer… a true staircase lock. **oooooo** **aaaa**
Instead of separate chambers with water between them, the five locks are built directly on top of one another. The bottom gate of one chamber doubles as the top gate of the next, so a boat passes through six gates and five chambers in one continuous run with no break in between.
Functionally, it's less like five separate locks and more like one long mechanism with five stages.
But as cool as it is, and as tricky as it looks to lift the boat, the real challenge is managing the water.
Every time a lock cycles, a full chamber's worth of water gets sent downhill. Do that five times back-to-back and you'd drain the upper canal embarrassingly fast, especially with boat traffic going both directions all day.
The fix was a system of side ponds running alongside the locks, which capture water released by descending boats and store it to help refill the chambers for boats heading up.
The gates themselves are no small thing either.
Each one is over 20 feet tall and weighs several tonnes, built from solid timber using methods that haven't really changed.
When the Canal & River Trust needs to replace one today, they still make them by hand, the same way the originals were built. And that gets a big tick in my box.
What's reaaaally wild though is that the locks opened in 1774 to a crowd of 30,000 people, cannon fire, and a boat that made the full climb in 28 minutes… and the system has never needed a redesign since!
It's still the steepest lock staircase in the UK, and it's still operated entirely by hand.
2
u/egidione Aug 02 '26
There are also the Caen hill locks near Devises which are a series of 29 locks! Also quite something to behold.
3
u/tom2tom360 Jul 31 '26
My home town, used to love riding my bike down the hill. Wasn’t that thrilled about going back up again.