Description: Looking west across the Erewash Valley with Cotmanhay in the distance and showing the landscaped (following opencasting for coal) former alignment of the Nottingham Canal. This follows the trees and then the hedgeline curving leftwards in the distance. The wall in the foreground is the parapet of a surviving overbridge, while the brick pier on the right once supported a high level bridge that carried a tramway linking the screens at Awsworth Colliery (situated south of the canal) with that mine's dirt tips on the north side of the waterway. Awsworth Colliery closed in 1899 but the bridge had probably been dismantled before that, leaving this solitary relic as a rather remarkable survivor almost a century later.
The Nottingham Canal extended from the River Trent at Nottingham in a generally north-westerly direction for 14.7 miles (23.6 kilometres) via Lenton, Radford, Wollaton, Trowell, Cossall, and Awsworth to Langley Mill where it connected with the Cromford and Erewash Canals. Its main purpose was the movement of coal from mines in the Erewash Valley to Nottingham. Opened in 1796, it was later acquired by the Great Northern Railway but, apart from the Nottingham-Lenton section (which was transferred to the Trent Navigation Company and, via its link with the Beeston Canal, remains in use today), it was abandoned in 1936.