Captain Clarke's Bridge & Hyde Rowing Club

Emergency Nightshift Blip!

On Saturday I took a walk around some of our locality with Youngest & Shadow. Here is Captain Clarke's Bridge on the Peak Forest Canal, back in the early 20th century thought to be worthy of a picture postcard in the Arcadia Bazaar series.

It is a roving bridge designed to allow tow horses to cross the canal where the towpath switches from one bank to the other, without disconnecting the towrope.

The house just set up to the right, Fern Bank, is still very much lived in and is in full view in old photographs of the bridge when the trees were much younger.

Since last visiting there are some stone cappings missing on the left hand wall where the path runs back down to canal level. I suspect this is unfortunately due to theft as there are no obvious remains. This will cause unnecessary expense to the Canal River Trust to bring it back into good order...grrrr :-/

The extra is the overgrown bank on the far side of the bridge where once lived St.Georges Rowing Club which ceased to exist in the late 1950s.