Waterways: The Royal Canal

THE AULD TRIANGLE - The Royal Canal has been disused and derelict for over half a century and it has now been painstakingly restored. Dick Warner is going to travel on it by barge from from the Liffey to the Shannon. It was 1992 when he first did something like this - travelling from the Liffey to the Shannon on the Grand Canal. Between then and now economic boom and bust has totally transformed Dublin's docklands. Why is he doing this? Because the passing years have failed to quench his thirst for exploration. Unexplored territory doesn't exist any more - but it's not necessary for exploration. And so he joins his boat, which is called Rambler, and is owned and crewed by members of the Connon family - John Junior, Evan and Johnnie Senior. There is another purpose to this journey. Rambler started life, in 1878, as a steam tug on the Royal Canal. The closure of the canal effectively marooned her because the other route west, the Grand Canal, has smaller locks and she won't fit into them. But now, at last, she has a chance to escape and to meet up with her long-lost sister, Chang Sha, and the other heritage boats on the Shannon. Dick and Rambler are searching for missing relatives. It's going to be a difficult journey. Rambler is very large and not very manoeuvrable - and she demonstrates this right from the start crashing into the wall of sea lock on her first day. Rambler needs water over a metre in depth to stay afloat. And the first day takes over half a day to travel just one kilometre. This canal was built for horse-drawn boats. Unfortunately we haven't got a horse - but to make it as far as Croke Park we have to resort to a modern day equivalent. Dick meets Ulick O'Connor on the banks of the Royal Canal at Mountjoy Prison and Ulick recounts humorous anecdotes and stories from Brendan Behan's colourful life and explains the significance of the 'Auld Triangle' that still hangs in the main hall of Mountjoy prison. In Drumcondra, Dick takes his electri

THE DEEP SINKING - In this week's episode of Waterways, Dick and the crew of Rambler leave the urban landscape of Dublin behind them to embark on the next leg of the journey. The outside world disappears as the canal dives into the Deep Sinking - a narrow rock cutting filled with extravagant vegetation. It runs from Castleknock to Clonsilla. Dick and the crew struggle slowly through with Rambler. Dick wonders how on earth this phenomenal cutting was built over two hundred years ago. On November 25th 1845 the evening passenger boat from Dublin to Longford struck a rock on the side of the Deep Sinking cutting and capsized. The horse was drowned. So were sixteen of the passengers. It is a fearsome place with underwater ghosts. As Rambler glides slowly through, Dick is haunted by the thought of those sixteen souls on the Longford boat. Who were they and why were they making the journey, at this time, just as the Great Famine was beginning to grip the country. And Rambler's slow journey through the 'Deep Sinking' is so unnecessary. Dick explains, it was the fault of William Fitzgerald, the second Duke of Leinster. He was a major shareholder in the company building the canal and he meddled with the plans. He insisted on changing the route to bring it closer to his great estate, Carton House, outside Maynooth. This meant cutting the canal through a massive limestone quarry, hence the 'Deep Sinking'. Next morning Rambler's escape from the Deep Sinking seems like a distant memory. Rambler pulls into Confey, the headquarters of the Royal Canal Amenity Group and Niall Galway reminisces on his childhood days growing up on the canal and the restoration of it. As the trains speed past Rambler on tracks running alongside the canal, Dick recounts that in 1845 the Midland Great Western Railway Company bought the Royal canal for £298,059. They had a plan to drain it and lay a new railway line along its bed. In the end they decided to build the line beside the waterway, n

THE LONG LEVEL - In this weeks episode of Waterways - Dick and the crew of Rambler enter the Long Level - the stretch of the Royal Canal between the seventeenth and eighteenth locks that's 32 kilometres long. At Cloncurry, Dick disembarks to pay his respects to Teresa Brayton and stroll along the 'Old Bog Road' - the famous road that inspired her nostalgic poem of the same name. On a nearby commemoration sign, Dick notes that Teresa Brayton is buried in the Cloncurry Graveyard. President Eamon de Valera unveiled a memorial to her there in 1959. She was a strong Nationalist and this motivated her to do something quite unusual in the emigrant experience. After Independence she returned from America to support the new State and lived here for over twenty years until her death in 1943 at the age of 81. In the graveyard Dick notices signs of unauthorised exhumation - rabbits have been excavating. The nearby Motte reminds Dick that rabbits were Norman animals. They were brought here by the invaders to provide them with food and fur - and then escaped into the Irish countryside. The men who looked after them were called warreners, after the rabbit warrens they were kept in. And Warrener became a surname and was shortened to Warner, so Dick ponders, the presence of wild rabbits in Ireland is the result of the inefficiency of his direct ancestors. Back on Rambler Dick and the crew approach Enfield Harbour beneath a canopy of trees. Enfield Harbour is tucked into its own little world, quite separate from the village and the busy motorway. Dick meets Brian O'Donoghue active member of the Enfield Royal Canal Amenity Group. He tells Dick about this secret place that was created over many years by dedicated people from the local community. Ten year old Lea Sutton enlightens Dick about the competitive angling that takes place on the banks of Canal near Enfield. Waterways Ireland engineer, John Mc Keown talks to Dick about how the original Royal Canal engineers, over

REACHING THE SUMMIT - In this weeks episode of Waterways Dick and the crew of Rambler reach the end of the Long Level and begin locking up to the summit level of the canal. Dick disembarks at Riverstown to explore long abandoned railway station at Killucan. No train has stopped here for 47 years, there's an eerie post-apocalypse feel about the place. James A. Corroon remembers a much busier time when passengers and livestock were regularly transported from Killucan Station. A campaign has begun to get the station re-opened again to serve the expanding communities surrounding it. Rambler faces a new obstacle on the canal - an accommodation bridge. It's there to accommodate a farmer who has land on both banks of the canal. It's a lifting bridge that has to be raised to allow boats to pass. Dick struggles with counter-balancing weights to lift the bridge, Rambler slides under. The level is so low that she is now sliding along the bed of the canal rather than floating on it. It's very slow going for Dick and the crew. Trains speed past the crew, Dick notes that the canal and the railway line have a close relationship, but not always a loving one. It was, after all, the competition from the railways that was a major factor in the decline of trade on the Royal Canal. This decline led to its final closure in 1961, a closure that was to last half a century. When the canals were being built they developed their own vocabulary. What on a railway line is called a 'cutting' was called a 'sinking' on a canal. In the early 1800's, the navies used charges of gun-powder, mules and shovels to cut their way through a limestone outcrop. This was a difficult and expensive business two hundred years ago when nothing was mechanised. Dick and the crew head into the second 'sinking', a very narrow cutting, barely wider than Rambler. The canal bends space and time to create its own dimension. Ireland has disappeared in a quaternion equation. Dick and the crew are in their own world

FORGOTTEN ROAD - Dick and the crew of Rambler are now well on their way to reaching the Shannon. At this stage in the journey their relationship with time has completely changed. They’ve adjusted to a much slower pace of life, a pace persisting from some earlier century. They reach Ballynacargy and Dick disembarks to wander around the neatly landscaped and well-maintained harbour. At the local ICA Country Market, Dick meets local food producer John Rogan. John gives him some of his delicious smoked bacon to sample and talks to him about how the banning of eel fishing almost shut his business down, hence he has diversified into smoking meats. At the wonderfully restored 36th Lock House, Dick meets owner and pet sitter June McNulty. She regularly walks her Alaskan malamute dog along the towpath and she talks to Dick about the peace and serenity she and her husband enjoy, living on the banks of the canal. The scenery Rambler passes through now is a flat green blanket patterned with wild-flowers – not dramatic just very pleasant. Michael Kenny from the Irish Peatland Conservation Council talks to Dick about frogs and newts, the ancient native amphibians living in the reeds along the canal. The canal approaches the Shannon near Ballymahon and then veers off to the north. The original engineers thought that if they took the short cut into Lough Ree they would be too close to competition from the Grand Canal and too far from the Arigna coal mines, which they hoped would provide profitable cargo. Rambler travels on into the valley of the River Inny, a major Shannon tributary. And in torrential rain, she gracefully crosses the Inny Aqueduct. The whole essence of canal travel is that it uses the power of water to break the shackles imposed by the laws of gravity so that it takes a very small effort to move a great weight. What one horse used to pull now fills two articulated lorries. The crew tie Rambler up at the peaceful harbour in Abbeyshrule for the nig

JOURNEY'S END - In this week's episode of Waterways Dick takes a break from Rambler and its crew and heads off in his canoe to enjoy a spot of fishing. He catches some perch and roach and carefully returns his prey to the canal. Back on Rambler he takes the wheel and guides the hull through green countryside on a ribbon of brown water like a spaceship on a long interplanetary mission. At Mosstown Harbour Dick disembarks to visit the Corlea Trackway Visitor Centre. He visits the preserved eighteen metre tocher, a section of the massive wooden roadway built across the bog in the year 148 BC. Noel Carberry shows Dick the fascinating bog vegetation surrounding the centre including some carnivorous pitcher plants whose prey-trapping mechanism features a deep cavity filled with liquid known as a pitfall trap. Rambler arrives at a junction, the first since they've left Dublin. It's the junction with the branch line of the canal that serves Longford town, or it used to. The line is still un-restored, blocked by a fresh dam of earth. Dick clambers down to investigate and begins the eight and half kilometre walk into Longford on the bank of the disused canal. He passes a hull like the ancient carcase of a beached whale, the bones exposed as the flesh is pecked off by the beak of time. Even without restoration the branch line is rather attractive, with a wealth of wild flowers and water-hens croaking away in the sedgy pools that remain. Eventually Dick ends up in the streets of Longford, standing in a car park that was once Longford Harbour. Back on Rambler she’s going better and seems impatient to shoulder her way out of locks, to get each bridge behind her, straining to make ground under the wide midland skies. At Kilashee Dick decides to pay a visit to Magan's pub for a pint. He meets brothers Dan and Mike Magan who's family own the pub and house. This is half pub and half museum and amongst the fascinating Guinness log books is collection is a pile of letters an