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First Canals

It was to be in Shropshire that Telford’s association with canals was to begin.  In September 1793 he was appointed as the general agent on the new Ellesmere Canal, working under William Jessop.  The canal was planned to link the ironworks and collieries of Wrexham with Chester, via the Shropshire town of Ellesmere, using the existing Chester Canal, and the River Mersey. His salary was 500 pounds a year from which he had to pay a clerk and a foreman.

The Canal Managers house at Ellesmere on the Ellesmere Canal in 1958.

While working on the Ellesmere Canal he was appointed surveyor and engineer to the Shrewsbury Canal following the death of its resident engineer Josiah Clowes in 1795.  Josiah had been building an aqueduct to cross the River Tern at Longden on Tern when he died.  The aqueduct, of a low arched stone construction, was soon washed away by flooding and replaced by Telford’s design for a cast iron trough structure.  This was not a new idea, Benjamin Outram had designed a similar cast iron aqueduct on the Derby Canal only a few months earlier.

Telford’s aqueduct was however much larger.  Longdon aqueduct was produced and constructed by the iron master William Reynolds and completed in 1796 just after the Derby aqueduct.

Shrewsbury Canal Lock gear at Trench
in 1954. This unusual Guillotine Lock
was commonly used on the Shrewsbury
Canal.

Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct on the Shrewsbury Canal in 1960.