Towpath Trails: the Walker's Guide

Introduction | The Barrow Line | The Grand Canal | The Royal Canal | Waterways Map

The Grand Canal

Route 3: Robertstown To Edenderry: 13 miles, 21 km

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This route takes you to Lowtown Junction, a triangular link between the main line of the Grand Canal which continues west and the beginning of the 28 mile Barrow branch of the canal. Lowtown once served the canal system as a stables for barge horses and as a coal yard. Today it is an inland dockyard. There, distant from any town, is a place of industry and activity within an island of canal links.

Pleasure boats of all shapes and sizes lie moored to either bank. In summer their number will be less with the craft having departed for cruises on the canal system but in winter the marina echoes to the sound of generators, angle-grinders and drills as boat owners snatch hours at the weekend to prepare their craft for another season's cruising.

Cross Fenton's bridge if you want to take a long look at the boating activity and perhaps enjoy a chat with a crew setting out for some distant point. Continue your walk by returning over Fenton's bridge to the north bank of the main line of the canal. The second canal junction which you pass as you leave Lowtown is another link to the Barrow line. The walk passes by a neat culvert over the clear waters of the River Slate - an important bogland drainage stream. The track continues under Bond Bridge on the Allenwood - Kilmeague road where the gravel laneway gives way to the grassy bank. Locals have installed seating and planted trees along the route - a gesture which says welcome' to the passing walker.

The canal now closes with the Prosperous - Edenderry road as a curiously angled bridge looms ahead. This is known locally as the skew bridge (pronounced by locals as Scow').

Here ignore the Grand Canal Way' signs which point along the north bank. This in fact would lead on to the busy and fast Edenderry Road. It is more comfortable to cross the Skew' bridge to the south bank where after a few paces on a tarmac road you gain a grassy stretch which in turn gives way to a minor canal bank road. This leads by a guillotine-style lifting bridge for a narrow gauge peat railway. Continue on to Hamilton's Bridge and cross back over to the north bank pausing on the bridge to take in the view to the south which reveals a vast stretch of airy peatland merging with the horizon.

Continue on a rough track under a narrow modern bridge, passing the redundant Lullymore briquette factory to the left.

Hartley Bridge at Ticknevin comes into view followed shortly by the 20th lock which marks the end of a 7-mile stretch without a lock gate but the start of an 18 mile level. It is from this point that the true wilderness of the Bog of Allen comes into its own. For a stretch the canal is bounded by bushy followed by forestry plantation but as the channel continues west across the unmarked Kildare-Offaly boundary the trees fall back, the ground falls away and the horizon widens. The canal is carried along on a massive embankment, its height accentuated by years of cutting away of the peatland.

The vista to the south is one of almost unending peatland: the flat horizon broken only by a power station cooling tower or peat-harvesting machinery moving like yellow mechanical insects across a desert of brown.

The canal-builders tempted nature along this stretch. It was here that the watery morass almost brought the entire canal project to an end in the late 18th century. Year after year workers had poured tons of filling into the canal foundation only to find that within the space of each winter the bog swallowed the solid material. It was only after a decade of back-breaking work that construction was possible on the treacherous bog and the canal was able to push on towards Edenderry.

However a bog is never a permanently stable foundation and over the years the canal rampart has breached as its underpinning gave way. The most serious breaches ever on the canal occurred along this stretch in 1916 and, even more spectacularly, in 1989 when just to the west of the Blundell viaduct a section of bank under the north towpath gave way releasing three hundred million litres of water into the fields below. The embankment was devastated and the canal drained for nearly twenty miles. The damage was repaired by a modern generation of canal engineers who have continued to embark on a rebuilding programme for other vulnerable stretches of canal across the bog. Layers of peat, plastic membrane and a special clay are laid one on top of the other to strengthen the old canal formation for another two centuries.

The towpath takes you across the Edenderry-Rathangan road by the Blundell viaduct (locally the tunnel') and to the unusual and charming horse-bridge which allowed towing horses cross the leg of canal which branches from the mainline to Edenderry town. Do not cross the bridge (unless you are carrying on further west along the main line) but follow the branch into Edenderry. After walking across so much flat land it is a welcome change in the perspective to find the waterway contouring around a hill which is crowned by the remains of an old castle. The branch curves into Edenderry's neat harbour which is located right beside the town's main street. There is plenty to see in this well planned estate town which owes its present shape and landmarks to the Earls of Downshire once the principal landlords in this area. A walk back up the hill towards the castle ruin which is surrounded by a public park will give a parting vista over the Bog of Allen and the canal route you have just walked.

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