The Caldon Canal runs 18 miles from Froghall to Stoke where it joins the Trent and Mersey. The canal is home to 17 locks and the 69 meter Froghall Tunnel. The Canal obtained its Act of Parliament in 1776 and was completed in 1779. The canal was built to carry limestone from Caldon Low Quarries.
Although the canal was never legally closed by the 1960's it was almost unusable. In one of the UK's first major canal restoration projects the canal was restored between 1970 and 1974.
The canal has one branch, the Leek Branch which runs for 3 miles and includes the 118 meter Leek Tunnel.
Originally the canal also had a 13 mile branch running from Froghall as far as Uttoxeter in Staffordshire, opened around 1811 (sometimes aka the "Uttoxeter Canal"). A large part of this branch was subsequently filled in, in 1845, and tracks were laid on it for the new railway (which incidentally although now dismantled, had the first automatic, train-operated level-crossing in the UK, at Spath, just outside Uttoxeter.)
A few bridges from the Uttoxeter branch remain, with the occasional 'milepost', and Uttoxeter still has an area called "The Wharf". There is occasionally talk of re-opening the Uttoxeter Branch and even of extending it as far as Burton-upon-Trent.
The CaldonCanal joins the Trent and Mersey at Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent, and was built to carry minerals from the uplands of the Peak District to the Potteries.
Limestone was brought by tramway to the canal terminus, and burnt in kilns.
This is where the CaldonCanal meets the Trent and Mersey Canal, and the location of Jesse Shirley’s Etruscan Bone Mill, built in 1857 to provide materials for the pottery industry.
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