VHS Price : £14.99
NTSC Price : £19.99
DVD Price : £16.99
The Millennium Ribble Link
It includes an account
of some of the many problems encountered, from Foot
and Mouth Disease to major flooding. It looks at
the environmental challenges that had to be faced, including the provision of
fish passes, and the need to preserve nesting sites for sand martins; and it
looks at how modern civil engineering construction
techniques were applied to the construction of a canal - something that hasn't
happened in this country for over a hundred years. The footage in this programme is
unique, and is supplemented by access to a digital photographic record made by
British Waterways throughout the construction of the canal.
The 18th Century builders of
the Leeds/Liverpool and Lancaster Canals always intended that the two waterways
should be linked.
However the ambitious scheme involved 75 miles of waterway and
two costly aqueducts across the Lune and Ribble valleys, and it was never
funded. As a result the beautiful Lancaster Canal has remained isolated from the
rest of the canal network for over 200 years.
In
1984, The Ribble Link Trust was formed to promote the idea that the two
waterways should be linked via the River Douglas,
the Ribble Estuary and a short new canal to be constructed along the line
of Savick Brook to join
the Lancaster in Preston's Haslam Park.
This video tells the remarkable story
of the Millennium Ribble Link, from early designs, a walk along the proposed
route in 1999 before construction started, and then a detailed chronological
record of the entire construction process from Nov 2000 through to the official
opening by the Rt. Hon Margaret Beckitt MP in September 2002.