Reaching The Summit

REACHING THE SUMMIT - In this weeks episode of Waterways Dick and the crew of Rambler reach the end of the Long Level and begin locking up to the summit level of the canal. Dick disembarks at Riverstown to explore long abandoned railway station at Killucan. No train has stopped here for 47 years, there's an eerie post-apocalypse feel about the place. James A. Corroon remembers a much busier time when passengers and livestock were regularly transported from Killucan Station. A campaign has begun to get the station re-opened again to serve the expanding communities surrounding it. Rambler faces a new obstacle on the canal - an accommodation bridge. It's there to accommodate a farmer who has land on both banks of the canal. It's a lifting bridge that has to be raised to allow boats to pass. Dick struggles with counter-balancing weights to lift the bridge, Rambler slides under. The level is so low that she is now sliding along the bed of the canal rather than floating on it. It's very slow going for Dick and the crew. Trains speed past the crew, Dick notes that the canal and the railway line have a close relationship, but not always a loving one. It was, after all, the competition from the railways that was a major factor in the decline of trade on the Royal Canal. This decline led to its final closure in 1961, a closure that was to last half a century. When the canals were being built they developed their own vocabulary. What on a railway line is called a 'cutting' was called a 'sinking' on a canal. In the early 1800's, the navies used charges of gun-powder, mules and shovels to cut their way through a limestone outcrop. This was a difficult and expensive business two hundred years ago when nothing was mechanised. Dick and the crew head into the second 'sinking', a very narrow cutting, barely wider than Rambler. The canal bends space and time to create its own dimension. Ireland has disappeared in a quaternion equation. Dick and the crew are in their own world