page_title: Charnwood Forest Canal
section_title: Origin
hierarchical_section_title: Charnwood Forest Canal / Origin
caption_attribution_description: The derelict Charnwood Forest Canal alongside the entrance to Longcliffe Golf Club in Nanpantan.
context_page_description: The Charnwood Forest Canal, sometimes known as the "Forest Line of the Leicester Navigation", was opened between Thringstone and Nanpantan, with a further connection to Barrow Hill, near Worthington, in 1794
  It marks the beginning of a period of history that saw the introduction of railways to supplement canals and, in the end, superseding them, leading eventually to the Midland Counties Railway. It was also one of the first uses of edge-rails for a wagonway.
context_section_description: Until the end of the eighteenth century the City of Leicester had received its supplies of coal by packhorse from the Charnwood Forest coal mines around Swannington.
  However, in 1778, the Loughborough Canal opened up the River Soar from the Trent to Loughborough, and the opening of the Erewash Canal the following year allowed a ready supply of coal from the Nottinghamshire coalfields into Leicestershire at reduced prices.
  In 1785, proposals to extend the Loughborough Canal south from Loughborough to Leicester were opposed by the influential Leicestershire coalmasters, even when a canal linking the mining area to the canal at Loughborough was also proposed. Gradually, however, they warmed to the idea and even came to consider a canal of their own linked to either Loughborough or the proposed Ashby Canal. By 1790 serious opposition to a branch canal from Loughborough to the coal field, known as the "Forest Line", had been won over and the following year the Leicester Navigation Company obtained an act of parliament to extend the Soar Navigation from Loughborough to Leicester, and to build the Forest Line.
  The considerable height difference between Nanpantan and Loughborough would have required a number of locks, for which there was not enough water, so the canal terminated at Nanpantan where goods had to be transhipped onto a horse-drawn wagonway which connected to Loughborough wharf. The tramway was engineered by William Jessop who used an iron edge-rail railway, in contrast to his partner Benjamin Outram, who, for other such lines, preferred the traditional iron "L" shaped flange-rail plateway.
  Wagonways also linked the other terminus of the Forest Line at Thringstone to the coal mines and to the limestone quarries at Barrow Hill and Cloud Hill.
  Considerable difficulties were encountered in constructing both the Soar Navigation and the Forest Line, and it was not until 1794 that they were both opened.
caption: The now derelict Charnwood Forest Canal alongside the entrance to Longcliffe Golf Club in Nanpantan.
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