Page:Rivers, Canals, Railways of Great Britain.djvu/30

8 the market-town of Dewsbury, and Horbury to Wakefield; at which place this branch of the Aire and Calder Navigation commences. From the navigation warehouse, at Wakefield Bridge, the course of the Calder is by Heath, Newland Park, formerly a preceptory of Knights Templars, but now the seat of Sir Edward Dodsworth, Bart. and Methley, where the Earl of Mexborough has a seat, to its junction with the Aire near Castleford; meandering for the distance of twelve miles and a half through a fertile and delightful valley. The fall from Wakefield Bridge to the union of the two rivers is 28½ feet by four locks, viz, at the Old Mills, Kirkthorpe, Lakes and Penbank. The total length of the navigation from Wakefield to Weeland is thirty-one miles and a half, and the total fall is 62¾ feet. A little above Wakefield Bridge are the Calder and Hebble Navigation Warehouses, and, on the opposite side of the river, the Earl of Cardigan's railway, which conveys the coal from his collieries at New Park, two miles from Wakefield. Half a mile below Wakefield the Barnsley Canal locks down into the River Calder. At Bottom Boat, about five miles and a half from Wakefield by the course of the navigation, the Lake Lock Railroad communicates with the river. This road, which was constructed about thirty years ago, by a company, without application to parliament, extends to the East Ardsley Coal-field, a distance of four miles from its junction with the navigation. When it was at first constructed, as its name imports, it joined the river at Lake Lock; it was, however, in 1804, removed to Bottom Boat, a mile lower down the river, to which place from seventy to one hundred thousand tons of coal are now annually brought down by this railroad: and another belonging to the Duke of Leeds, communicating with his collieries on Wakefield Outwood, terminates within a short distance of the former, from which forty or fifty thousand tons of coal are shipped annually.

Though the first act for making this navigation was passed in the year 1699, an attempt for the same purpose had been made long before, for on the 15th of March, 1625, the first year of Charles the First's reign, a bill was brought into the House of Commons, entitled,  'An Act for the making and maintaining the rivers of Ayre and Cawldes, in the West Riding of the countye of Yorke, navigable and passable for Boats, Barges, and other Vessels, &amp;c.'