Marple Aqueduct (also known as Goyt Aqueduct) so the structure was completed by Broadhead and Anderson.
Some five months earlier, in October 1794, a contract for excavating part of the canal had been given to an American called Robert Fulton and his partner Charles McNiven. They failed to get on with the work, which Outram reported to the committee in March 1795. Fulton then began offering engineering advice to the committee, including the use of tub-boats and inclined planes rather than conventional narrow boats and locks. Outram and two others were sent to visit Coalbrookdale on the Shropshire Canal, to see such a system, and returned to report favourably on the idea. Although work had already started on the aqueduct, he suggested that it should be constructed with iron troughs, instead of the stone arches in Outram's design. The committee approved the use of iron, and encouraged Fulton to commit his ideas to print. An article on Small Canals was published in the London Star on 30 July 1795, and a book entitled A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation followed in 1796, probably financed by the canal company. He was still working for the company in September 1795, but then disappears from their records.
Once Fulton had departed, the ideas of tub boats and inclined planes were dropped, and the aqueduct reverted to using stone arches. The keystones for the three arches were fitted in 1799 and the work was sufficiently complete that it was filled with water in May 1800. However, work continued on it until late 1801. Repair work to the wing wall of one of the piers was required in 1817, when it was found to be collapsing. Seven men lost their lives during its construction.
The structure is long and contains some of masonry. The lower parts are of red sandstone from the nearby Hyde Bank quarry, while the upper parts are of white stone The piers supporting the arches are at centres. Its height is only exceeded by the Pontcysyllte aqueduct in Wales, an iron trough carried on stone columns, where the height above the river is .
In 1860, repeated frost heave after water leaked through the puddling of the trough resulted in an deflection of the parapet. Part of the side wall was rebuilt, and bolts with tie bars were used to hold the two faces of the central arch together. Metal tie bars were added to the other arches in 1912, but otherwise maintenance was sparse. By the time the waterways were nationalised in 1948, the canal was semi-derelict, and mainly acted as a water supply for canal-side industries in Manchester. A British Transport Commission report published in 1955 recommended closure or disposal of of waterways, including the Peak Forest Canal. The lack of maintenance led to water seeping into the puddling and stonework of the aqueduct, and during the very cold winter of 1961/62, freezing and thawing of the water resulted in the outer face of the north-east arch collapsing into the river below, on 9 January 1962.
Like many canal aqueducts, there was a parapet on the towpath side of the structure, but very little protection on the other side. In 2017 the Canal and River Trust decided that this should be remedied for the safety of boaters, and Knight Architects designed a metal parapet which would not detract from the historic nature of the structure. Vertical posts with one vertical leg and another raked leg supported a horizontal rail at the top. The parapet was assembled in sections, which were delivered to site by boat, and fixed to the top of the existing low wall. Inspiration for the design came from weaving, with the vertical posts representing the warp and the horizontal rail representing the weft. Historically, the aqueduct was close to Mellor Cotton Mill. The work was completed in 2018, and was runner-up in the 2019 Living Waterways Awards for heritage and conservation. The railings were funded from part of a £1.7 million donation from the People's Postcode Lottery, which also helped with emergency rebuilding of lock 15 of the Marple flight, and repairs to two other locks in the 16-lock flight.
See also
- Grade I listed buildings in Greater Manchester
- Listed buildings in Marple, Greater Manchester
- List of canal aqueducts in Great Britain
- Scheduled Monuments in Greater Manchester
Gallery
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File:Marple Aqueduct as viewed from a drone.jpg|Marple Aqueduct, viewed from a drone
File:Marple Aqueduct1.jpg|Working boat traversing the aqueduct
File:Marple Aqueduct2.jpg|Working narrowboat, with the viaduct to the north
File:Renata Marple Aqueduct.jpg|Working freight boat
File:Marple Canal 0342.JPG|The canal swings away and passes under the railway viaduct
File:Marple Lock 1 0348.JPG|The canal then enters the Marple flight of locks.
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