This short stretch of canal is over 60m higher than the connecting canal a couple of miles away.  Astonishingly though, there is no system of locks to get from the top to the bottom!

Connecting the canal at Blists Hill to the waterways at the bottom of the hill is the Hay Inclined Plane.  Seeing more about it is definitely one of the reasons why we want to return to Ironbridge Gorge again, but we saw the bottom of the inclined plane while walking to the pottery museum: we took a photo of it, thinking “WTF is that” – we saw no signs or details about it while at the bottom.

We’ll be back.  Train tracks emerging from a canal at the bottom of a hill, and tell of an ingenious way of carrying cargo between 1792 and 1894 at the top is well worthy of further investigation!