The Deep Sinking

THE DEEP SINKING - In this week's episode of Waterways, Dick and the crew of Rambler leave the urban landscape of Dublin behind them to embark on the next leg of the journey. The outside world disappears as the canal dives into the Deep Sinking - a narrow rock cutting filled with extravagant vegetation. It runs from Castleknock to Clonsilla. Dick and the crew struggle slowly through with Rambler. Dick wonders how on earth this phenomenal cutting was built over two hundred years ago. On November 25th 1845 the evening passenger boat from Dublin to Longford struck a rock on the side of the Deep Sinking cutting and capsized. The horse was drowned. So were sixteen of the passengers. It is a fearsome place with underwater ghosts. As Rambler glides slowly through, Dick is haunted by the thought of those sixteen souls on the Longford boat. Who were they and why were they making the journey, at this time, just as the Great Famine was beginning to grip the country. And Rambler's slow journey through the 'Deep Sinking' is so unnecessary. Dick explains, it was the fault of William Fitzgerald, the second Duke of Leinster. He was a major shareholder in the company building the canal and he meddled with the plans. He insisted on changing the route to bring it closer to his great estate, Carton House, outside Maynooth. This meant cutting the canal through a massive limestone quarry, hence the 'Deep Sinking'. Next morning Rambler's escape from the Deep Sinking seems like a distant memory. Rambler pulls into Confey, the headquarters of the Royal Canal Amenity Group and Niall Galway reminisces on his childhood days growing up on the canal and the restoration of it. As the trains speed past Rambler on tracks running alongside the canal, Dick recounts that in 1845 the Midland Great Western Railway Company bought the Royal canal for £298,059. They had a plan to drain it and lay a new railway line along its bed. In the end they decided to build the line beside the waterway, n