Lighthouse

Hospital days come around all too frequently. This was a long one. Our usual side room was in use so I couldn’t stay. I therefore took myself off to a new location for me, only a short journey away - the Boat Museum, officially the National Inland Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port. As usual I found myself wondering why I had never been before.

It is a fascinating place. I hadn’t realised that Ellesmere Port is so called because the decision to create a port here was taken by business people in Ellesmere, Shropshire - 30 miles away. That involved extending a canal from Shropshire through Chester to the Mersey, the ambition being to also connect to the Severn, with the docks here opening in 1795, and the town grew from that. For a hundred years its role was around transportation, with Mersey Flats (boats) transporting raw materials and goods to and from Liverpool and the inland canals taking the same to and from the Midlands. The construction of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894 turned the town into a major industrial centre, and the landscape is still dominated by the chimneys at Stanlow.

The main photo was taken adjacent to the Ship Canal. The building is Whitby lighthouse, the inlet leads to Whitby Dock. It was only operable for 14 years from 1880 to 1894 when the adjacent Ship Canal opened (it stood overlooking the Mersey estuary originally). The extra shows the Island Warehouse within the museum site, surrounded by canals and basins. It was one of those days when one of fifty photos would have served as my blip, there is a lot to explore here.