Qualla: Lagan Canal

Lagan Canal: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a stretch of the M1 motorway between Sprucefield and Moira where the asphalt sits on top of an 18th-century canal bed. When the road was built in 1965, the engineers simply filled in the canal and laid the tarmac over it - 7.7 miles of summit level, ten masonry locks, towpaths, lock-keeper's cottages, all gone under the concrete. The Lagan Canal had only been closed seven years. Nobody at the time imagined that within a generation people would want it back. Today's restoration campaigners face a slightly absurd task: most of the central section no longer exists, and a six-lane motorway sits on the route. They are working on the bits that survived. There turn out to be quite a lot of them.

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Lagan Canal: Paid For with Whiskey

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The River Lagan at Moira sits only 10 kilometres from Lough Neagh, the largest freshwater lake in Britain or Ireland, and the terrain between them is flat. The first proposal to dig a connecting canal was made in 1637 but nothing happened. By the 1750s, with coal newly discovered...

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Lagan Canal: The Marquess of Donegall's Hobby

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The river-navigation worked badly. Floods washed away the banks in winter, the local linen-bleaching industry needed the same water the canal wanted, and beyond Sprucefield the work simply stopped. A young engineer named Robert Whitworth - James Brindley's chief surveyor - assess...

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Lagan Canal: Quietly Successful, Then Suddenly Not

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For most of the 19th century the Lagan Canal was one of only two commercially successful inland waterways in the north of Ireland. It survived the arrival of the Ulster Railway in the 1840s, paid its first dividend in 1859, and by the 1870s was carrying more than double the traff...

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Lagan Canal: Buried Under the Motorway

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Some things in Britain's industrial heritage are lost slowly. The Lagan Canal was lost fast. In 1965 the Northern Ireland government decided that the obvious route for the new M1 motorway from Belfast to Dungannon was along the old canal's central level, where the line had alread...

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Lagan Canal: What Survives, and Who's Fighting for It

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Where the canal escaped the motorway, things are happening. The Lagan Navigation Trust, founded in 2008 and renamed in 2016, has identified the remaining sections as a single restorable corridor. Lock 12 at Lisburn has been restored to navigable condition. Lock 3 at Newforge, wit...

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