Tales from Harecastle Tunnel

A Place in History: NarrowBoat, Winter 2025

Andy Tidy heads deep beneath Harecastle Hill to reveal a story of bold engineering and electric ingenuity

This is our free-access sample article from the Winter 2025 NarrowBoat

My childhood introduction to canal tunnels centred on Harecastle, one of the nation’s longest, which provides a subterranean north-south connection between the plains of Cheshire and the Potteries. Our early underground adventures took place in the late 1960s, at which time the tunnel’s roof lining bulged down in several places, and the remains of a raised towpath projected ominously from its corrosive, ochre-coloured waters. In those days most hire-boats were made from flimsy plywood. Ours was a Dawncraft cruiser with a centre cockpit, which came complete with a supposedly collapsible windshield. When we had gone into the tunnel far beyond the point of no return, we discovered that the collapsible windscreen had been fixed in the ‘up’ position following an earlier accident, and the end result was, as Spacex would describe it, a sudden and unscheduled disassembly. Somewhat strangely, the pair observed the water in the tunnel rise by over 1ft in an hour, with…