Canal Feeder - Page 5

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Water is fed from Elton Reservoir into the Manchester, Bolton & Bury canal via two sluice gates and water channels.
The first sluice is to the right of the metal footbridge, leading to this wide channel which passes under the footbridge, narrows and then skirts the base of the reservoir embankment.
It seems to be used mainly as an overflow from the reservoir nowadays.

Close-up of the sluice control.
The iron rack attached to the white wooden post is clearly very old and may even be the original fitting.

Walk along the embankment with its panoramic views to the East of Bury for about 300 metres until you reach this small brick building.
It contains the control gear for the second, and obviously still in use, sluice gate, allowing water out of the reservoir and into the canal.

On the reservoir side of this building two large square-thread screws emerge at the base.

These screws drive brackets attached to massive wooden beams, in the centre of this photograph, that slope down into the water to move the sluice gate.

Looking in the opposite direction a water channel can be seen emerging from the bottom of the embankment and meandering towards the canal, which runs horizontally near the top of this photograph just past the fields.

The channel from Elton Reservoir ends here, when it joins the Manchester, Bolton and Bury canal. This is in front of the former nightclub (currently being demolished) near the canal bridge on Hinds Lane, where the canal widens out and there is an overflow into the river Irwell below.

Some canals which are still in use today, when faced with the problem of insufficient water supply at the top level, resort to electric pumps to transfer water from the lower side of locks back up to the higher side. It is interesting how, over two hundred years ago, the designers of the Manchester, Bolton & Bury Canal were able to provide a water supply entirely by the use of gravity, without any external power.
In the 1790s a steam engine to pump the water up would have been costly to operate in both labour and coal, whereas today mechanical power is relatively cheap.

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