Description: The River Rother looking south-east with Tapton Bridge in the distance; the latter carries Brimington Road (the B6543). Since the 18th century the form and use of the Rother immediately north of Chesterfield has been closely entwined with the history of the Chesterfield Canal, which used it (apparently without any legal authority) to reach the town from Tapton.
The Chesterfield Canal was a 46 mile waterway that ran from West Stockwith on the River Trent in a generally south-westerly direction via Retford and Worksop to reach Chesterfield. It opened in 1777 and remained quite successful until the mid-1800s when much of its traffic began to be lost to railways and indeed it was taken over by the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (later re-styled the Great Central Railway) in 1846. In engineering terms the canal was effectively in two parts with a summit pound at Norwood, west of Worksop, approached on either side by long flights of locks. The summit level included the narrow and lengthy Norwood Tunnel, which at 2,884 yards (2,637 metres) was the longest canal tunnel in the country when first built. However, it was the tunnel that proved to be the achilles heel of the canal as it was plagued by mining subsidence, which eventually caused its closure in 1908, thus isolating the westernmost section of the waterway. There was very little traffic above Worksop after this and the portion to Chesterfield gradually became derelict. Eventually sections were drained, filled in or built over.
In recent years the Chesterfield Canal Trust have developed long term plans to reopen the canal all the way from Chesterfield to Kiveton, the present head of navigation at the eastern end of the now blocked Norwood Tunnel. Between 1989 and 2012 restoration of the length from Chesterfield (Tapton) to Staveley was completed in stages and a new terminus basin constructed at Chesterfield in advance of a commercial redevelopment scheme. At the time of writing (2014) this basin is not yet connected to the restored section of canal.
In fact, the history of the Canal's terminus arrangements at Chesterfield is a complicated one. The original wharf was to the north of the town at the bottom of Wharf Lane but this was severed around 1890 when the owning Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway built its line through Chesterfield. A replacement was provided further south nearer to Tapton Bridge but with the ending of traffic to Chesterfield this basin was also lost and the area redeveloped.
In this view the site of the entrance to the 1890 basin is on the right, roughly where the hawthorn tree is located. Reinstatement of navigation into Chesterfield and the bringing into use of the currently isolated new basin will require construction of an entrance lock - this will be situated slightly further south than its immediate predecessor, just before Tapton Bridge and again on the right.