The Tavistock Canal 4½miles

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Before the Tavistock Canal was built there was no wheeled transport for the ores, slate, agricultural produce manure and lime which was transported to and from the port at Morewellham. The roads could not take carts and instead relied on trains of pack horses. In winter roads were often impassable streams. This meant trade was expensive and slow. The solution was a canal. John Taylor a land surveyor, civil engineer and leading figure in metalliferous mining was the man behind the Tavistock Canal. The geography meant that the route would include an aqueduct across the Lumburn valley and an embankment, a 2540yard tunnel through Morewell Down and an inclined plane down the steep side of the River Tamar. Taylor studied the other canals being built in the UK at that time and learnt from their experiences. But the Tavistock Canal was different to other canals.  Not only was the canal built for transport it was designed in a way to be a power source for local farms and mines. The canal has a slight gradient, one foot per mile, which allowed its flow to be used by approx. 30 waterwheels. This was intended to make the canal banks a very desirable place for industry to locate.  The flow meant that while one horse could pull a boat with the current, it took two to make the return trip against it. The third purpose of the canal was mining. The canal needed a tunnel to be built and the hope was that it would pass through copper lodes; indeed the canal navigation was secondary to the copper prospecting. The tunnel is one of the deepest canal tunnels in the country. The canal was 4.8metres wide and 0.9metres deep.
Work began on 29 August 1803. By 1810 the canal was navigable from the Abbey Weir at Tavistock to the northern entrance to the tunnel. The Mount Foundry Iron works at Tavistock were commissioned to build a boat for the canal. It was designed to carry 8 tons, was 38ft long with a 15ft beam. It was launched on Easter Monday 1811.
The canal was officially opened on 24 June 1817 and cost between £40,000 and £68,000. There was a 2 mile branch  to the Mill Hill slate quarry.