When the Irish railway engineer Sir John Macneill toured the Ulster Canal in 1861, he was asked for his professional opinion on its future. His advice was simple: drain it and let cows graze on the bed. The Ulster Canal had been open just twenty years and was already a financial ruin. The locks had been built deliberately narrower than every other waterway it should have connected to. The water supply was inadequate. The contractors had walked off the job. Thomas Telford himself, drafted in to inspect the works, had ordered a redesign that drove the lock count from eighteen to twenty-six. It was, the historian L.T.C. Rolt later wrote, a canal that should never have been dug. And yet, almost two hundred years later, Waterways Ireland is digging it again.
The dream of cutting a waterway across Ulster went back to 1778, when a proposal was made to link Ballyshannon on the Atlantic coast to Lower Lough Erne for thirty-two thousand pounds. The vision quickly grew: continue from Enniskillen to Belturbet, then on through Ballyconnell to the River Shannon at Leitrim, and you would have a trans-Irish waterway connecting Belfast in the east to Limerick in the west, rivalling the Grand and Royal Canals to the south. A section between Ballyshannon and Belleek was built starting in 1783, with Richard Evans of the Royal Canal overseeing the work. Then the money ran out in 1794, and the project slept. By 1814 the Directors General of Inland Navigation revived it as a job-creation scheme. The engineer John Killaly surveyed the route in 1815 and produced an estimate of 233,000 pounds for a 35.5-mile link between Lough Neagh and Lough Erne.
Killaly made a decision that doomed the project before a single sod was cut. He chose to build the locks the same size as the Royal Canal's, about 76 feet by 13.3 feet wide. The problem was geography. The boats already plying Lough Neagh, the Lagan Canal, the Newry Canal and the Coalisland Canal were all 14.8 feet wide. A canal designed for narrower boats could not carry them. Through trade was impossible without transhipment at either end. When Thomas Telford was sent over to inspect the works in the late 1820s, he revised the design, increased the lock count from eighteen to twenty-six, and somewhere along the way someone, possibly Telford himself, settled on building the locks just twelve feet wide. The final lock at Wattlebridge ended up only 11.7 feet wide, the narrowest in Ireland. The canal was finished in 1841 at a cost of over 230,000 pounds. It could not carry the boats that used the waterways at either end.
The Ulster Canal lost money from the moment it opened. The water supply was inadequate, so navigation was only possible for eight months of the year, mostly at the Lough Erne end. The contractor William Dargan leased it after 1851 and ran the only meaningful carrying operation it ever had. The Ulster Railway reached Monaghan in 1858, and three years later, with the canal in ruins, Sir John Macneill recommended draining it. The government took back control in 1865, spent 22,000 pounds on repairs over eight years, and reopened the canal in 1873. The water supply was still inadequate. The Lagan Navigation Company was eventually pressured into taking over the canal in 1888 under a clause the House of Lords refused to remove: no permission to abandon for ten years. They were saddled with the maintenance liability in perpetuity. The profits from their other canals were swallowed up keeping the Ulster Canal half-open. The last boat passed in 1929, and a warrant of abandonment came on 9 January 1931.
When the Lagan Navigation Company was dissolved in 1954, the stretch of canal in the newly independent Republic of Ireland fell into legal limbo. There was no owner. The legal Latin term is bona vacantia, ownerless goods, and Irish law sent it to the Minister for Finance. Ownership eventually returned to the Office of Public Works. Monaghan County Council, Monaghan Urban District Council and Clones Urban District Council picked up some sections under the Derelict Sites Act 1961. Other stretches remained occupied and could not be acquired. The canal, in other words, became a paperwork problem stretching across two jurisdictions, with parts of it grazed by cows just as Sir John Macneill had once suggested.
And then, against all reasonable expectation, the canal began to come back. In 2007 the North-South Ministerial Council announced restoration of the Clones-to-Upper-Lough-Erne stretch, with an estimated cost of 35 million euros. Waterways Ireland published a restoration plan in 2010, and in February 2015 Minister Heather Humphreys gave approval for the first phase between Castle Saunderson and the Erne basin. Phase one was largely complete by 2019. Phase two, funded by the Taoiseach's Shared Island fund and the Department of Rural and Community Development with about 11.5 million euros committed between December 2020 and April 2021, includes a 40-berth marina, two new bridges and crucially a sustainable water supply. Phase three will link everything together, bringing the restored canal to 13.5 kilometres and crossing the border several times. Building it the first time took sixteen years. Rebuilding it is taking longer. But this time the locks are wide enough for the boats.
The Ulster Canal traces a southwest-to-northeast line from Wattlebridge on the Finn River, just south of Upper Lough Erne, across the border into County Monaghan, past Clones and Smithborough, over the summit near Monaghan town, then down through County Armagh past Middletown and Benburb to Charlemont on the River Blackwater. Centre of route around 54.13°N, 7.37°W. Original 74 km length, 26 locks. The summit level was 213 ft above sea level. The restored sections at the southern end are visible as fresh blue ribbons against the surrounding bog and pasture. Nearest commercial airports are Belfast International (EGAA) and City of Derry (EGAE). Best viewing altitude 1,500-3,000 ft to trace the canal's straight cuts and the contrasting curves of the Finn and Blackwater rivers it connects.