Along the Moors - Wappenshall

Decline

Wappenshall’s monopoly on the transport of local goods in east Shropshire was relatively short-lived and effectively ended when the railway network arrived in east Shropshire during the mid-19th Century. By 1870, the public house which had opened to take advantage of passing trade from the thriving waterway had closed, although the canal managed to struggle on until abandonment by its owners, the LMS railway company, in 1944. Despite closure, the wharf complex developed by the Duke of Sutherland remains as a remarkable survival of Wappenshall’s golden age.

On private land just off the main road through the village, the former office of the clerk to the canal company (whose job it was to collect tolls and check cargoes) and the Duke of Sutherland’s transhipment warehouse, which was built in the years following the opening of the waterway, stand adjacent to the filled-in remains of the basin. The impressive two-storey building retains many original features, including a covered, internal dock and trap doors cut into the floor to allow goods to be hoisted from the barges below. Beyond the warehouse, the ‘wide waters’ where boats would once have turned to head for Trench and the coalfield also remain and are straddled by a fine ‘roving’ bridge over the junction of the Shrewsbury and Newport branches of the canal.