The Llangollen canal’s at it for what seems the umpteenth time! The huge breach at Whitchurch wasn’t even a year ago and sadly the canal has seen further calamities.

Besides Whitchurch, that’s Swanley, Wrenbury, Frankton – and now Hampton Bank. Four breaches – plus one lift bridge mauled by a lorry. Its not looking good. Its curious why all these breaches are on this particular canal. Maybe its the method of construction and 220 years later its various embankments are coming apart. Maybe its also, as in the case of Hampton Bank, a case of trying to future proof the canal’s embankments – but those efforts instead have achieved what amounts to a substantial breach.

To recap, Whitchurch was the big one. Those others at Swanley and Frankton were fairly minor, these being very low embankments. The former had allowed boats to be towed carefully past the site of the breach hence the Llangollen canal was not closed to navigation. A sidelong cofferdam was in use (they call it a horseshoe cofferdam) and that allowed a fair bit of space for boats to squeeze past under supervision.

The one at Swanley was of a similar arrangement (again a horseshoe cofferdam) however this was placed much further across the centre of the canal – thus navigation has not really been possible because the remaining channel is quite tight. It has been said some small number of supervised boat movements will be allowed through Swanley this winter.

Wrenbury lift bridge – the village’s canal side area is a major tourist attraction with its marina, pubs and a canal aqueduct. The power operated lift bridge got hit by a lorry that took a wrong turning about six weeks ago. See BBC News. Picture is the author’s from 2004 showing a Wiseman milk tanker crossing the bridge. The vehicle that hit the bridge was evidently larger.

As for Hampton Bank, that’s the strange one! Months ago CRT had said they were going to carry out surveys of all its embankments including Hampton Bank. The conducted a series of ground borings and LIDAR to ascertain the state of the embankment. Its not a huge one but it is quite lengthy with a couple of bends in it – there’s a fair embankment at one end (as shown on Google Maps) and a shallower one at the other – hence it became a focal point where CRT began site investigations on the canal’s embankments. Court Above the Cut had a video covering the work at Hampton Bank earlier this year.

July 2025 scene showing the location of the culvert and where the canal breached. This screencap is from Google Maps.

As the above picture shows, early on those surveys (July 2025) had revealed the Hampton Bank embankment under investigation particularly at this point. Pumping of water around the faulty culvert had already begun at this time- hence the small restriction on navigation – meaning mooring was barred and boats had to take care passing the site. In the meantime, CRT brought in specialists to photograph and clean the culvert. During this work the culvert suddenly gave way. The camera was fortunately being pulled out at that moment so they probably have some footage or photographs of what happened.

Its not certain why it happened however the culvert had partially collapsed and caused minor flooding. Workers are seen here trying to plug the hole that had formed n the embankment. Screencap from Kieran & Lottie Photography/Riley Robey Youtube.

The subsequent breach was filmed at night by Riley Robey (Dave) and others. Here’s a scene from that video:

The same scene as the earlier calamity. This is at night when a substantial breach occurred in the banks and the canal emptied. The earlier work can be seen in the centre of the picture. Scene from Kieran & Lottie Photography/Riley Robey Youtube.

‘The latest canal breach in Shropshire has this time left a small countryside community reeling.’ Shropshire Star.

The video of the breach that was filmed at night is below. You can of course watch it on Youtube.

Kieran and Lottie Photography/Riley Robey – Major Canal Breach As It Happened! Youtube.

The initial fracas during the afternoon was avoided by way of dropping aggregates and tarpaulins in order to plug the collapsed section. It was thought it had all settled, because the tarpaulin and stones got sucked in and the flow of water stopped. However unknown to the contractors, water was still finding its way through the embankment and last night there was a substantial breach causing considerable flooding.

The calamity was filmed by Kieran & Lottie Photography/Riley Robey and Steve Court (Court Above the Cut) among others. Steve has a good video showing the affected site in the early hours of the morning – the breach is quite visible in the bed of the canal. Its clear the attempts to plug the initial hole were not successful because a section of the canal with piling has collapsed.

Screencap from Court Above the Cut’s video showing the collapsed section. The tarps and the bags of stones etc can be seen, which were used to try and plug the initial section that had shown signs of collapse.

When Steve says (as the subtitles above show) ‘what an absolute shame this has happened’ that’s exactly how I see it – as many years ago I used to work on this canal! Anyway a much larger hole can be seen behind where the entire bank has gone. Its visible where the gate is shown at upper left in Steve’s video. There’s a close-up of that hole shown on Steve’s video. The workers had initially tried to plug this section and it seemed it had worked at the time. The blue tarpaulin that is visible was used to try and plug the bit that was in the canal bank itself. That had initially worked too. In the earlier video by Kieran & Lottie Photography/Riley Robey Youtube, workers can be seen placing this blue tarpaulin in the canal bank. To the left can be seen an orange tarpaulin, and it seems possible this section was the first to go, then that where the blue tarpaulin was used began to go next. Its why in Kieran & Lottie Photography/Riley Robey’s video, the workers ran off the canal bank quickly – because they feared the whole bank was going to give way.

It actually did give way, but not until night-time, and this is when the major flooding in question occurred.

Its evidently not a good state of affairs when its the same canal having a number of substantial failures to its infrastructure. Incidentally Hampton Bank had a breach more than twenty years ago as reported on BBC News. Repairs took three months. It could be the embankments’ failures that has something to do with badgers. Aside from that, months ago I wrote about how the early canals (eg the Bridgewater) had employed a suspect method of building canal embankments. Later, I also wrote that the canal engineers in Europe – who were trained – were surprised to see the canals across England featured numerous embankments in their construction. It was thought this was not good, especially when these things were being built by self taught engineers. Nevertheless, there’s every indication these embankments have held up for more than 200 years! So the exact nature of these embankments’ failures is yet to be understood.

At Whitchurch there is a lot of commentary about how the embankments were built and there is general consensus they were not built very well because of the amount of sand used.

At Swanley, Frankton, and Hampton Bank, the embankment failures were in fact due to the culverts beneath, opposed to what happened at Whitchurch. Evidently a failed culvert isn’t very good news when there are embankments of such type as these sandy ones. In the case of Hampton Bank, the workers initially thought they had plugged the breach, but it can now be seen that there were further encroachments within the embankment that caused this newest, more substantial, breach.

It does look as if the reopening of the Llangollen canal planned for around Easter 2027 might be compromised by these further incidents.

Update: Aside from the breach that occurred at night, its been said the canal embankment has perished further. Pumping is now being used to transfer the water around the breach site. Excavators have been brought in to begin the task of removing the damaged earth bounds and then rebuilding the embankment. Evidently this is going to be at least another half year or so before this work is completed – unless CRT do manage to hotfoot it somehow, given all the other parts of the canal that are needing urgent attention besides the major work at Whitchurch. There’s additional work going on at Grindley Brook, Povey’s Lock and other sites on the canal. CRT is taking the opportunity to undertake essential works whilst the canal is largely closed – now they have more than enough on their hands. It seems the Llangollen canal will not reopen fully until perhaps the early summer of 2027.

Update 2: It seems the only video showing the full alignment of the Hampton Bank culvert is this aerial scene from Taylors as shown below. I have marked the approximate course of the culvert in red and this closely aligns with the damaged parts of the embankment. Its a lengthy culvert so basically its impossible to see where it passes underneath the canal. Evidently a quick visual inspection isn’t possible because the culvert’s entrances are some distance away from the canal. It means a robot with a camera has to be sent through to assess the culvert’s condition.

The culvert’s approximate alignment. Screencap from Taylors Aboard Narrowboats Youtube.

This evening (14th November 2026) Dave (Riley Robey) uploaded a video of the site and what’s currently happening. In that video there’s an even better perspective of the locality clearly showing the stream that ventures through the culvert in question. It seems the other end of the culvert comes out by the B5063, at the very location (Google Maps) where the flooding was filmed last night. On the right (as shown below) is the gate to the adjoining house and on the left is where the floodwaters were heading – back into the stream in question.