Our Sites

Pontcysyllte Aqueduct crosses the Dee Valley on nineteen cast iron spans at a height of 126 feet/38.4 meters: a structure recognised internationally as a masterpiece of waterways engineering and a pioneering example of iron construction.  The canal exemplifies the new approaches to engineering developed by Britain during the Industrial Revolution and taken up in subsequent waterway, railway and road construction throughout the world.  The engineers intervened in the landscape with a new scale and intensity, challenged by the need to cut the waterways across the grain of the Welsh upland topography. At the time of its completion this length of canal was described as ‘composed of works of more difficult of execution than can perhaps be found anywhere within an equal distance of canal navigation’.  It combined vigour of engineering with a particular sensitivity to its impact on a valued landscape. All of the features were to become characteristic of highly engineered transport routes can be seen in the site, including tunnels, cuttings, aqueducts and embankments, many of them technically innovative or of a monumental scale, together with bridges, culverts, weirs and associated features.  The whole site has remained in continuous use for two hundred years – for some one hundred and thirty years by traffic in coal, iron, slate, limestone and general goods, and in more recent times to carry pleasure boats and convey drinking water.  It is widely valued for its historical importance, beautiful environment and breathtaking structures and attracting hundreds of thousand visitors a year.

Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and Canal are outstanding monuments of the canal age in the United Kingdom, which flourished from 1760s  until the establishment of a network of locomotive railways form the 1830s.  Canal building reached its zenith after 1790, during the so called ‘Canal Mania’ that saw 1,180 miles/1,900 kilometers of new waterways completed in just 20 years.  The construction of a network of canals in Britain to provide transport for raw materials and goods represented a new phase in the history of inland navigation and was a fundamental factor in the Industrial Revolution, enabling and promoting rapid economic growth, regional specialisation and urbanisation.