8 Lake/ River/ Ponds to Explore in Cheshire

The Bridgewater Canal is a 65km canal stretching from Runcorn to Leigh and is owned and operated by the Peel Group. It is sometimes described as England’s first canal and has a special place in history as the first canal in Britain to be built without following an existing watercourse, and so became a model for those that followed it.

Knypersley Reservoir is a canal feeder reservoir near Biddulph in Staffordshire. It is located south-east of Biddulph and named after the local Knypersley area. The reservoir was built in 1827 to supply water to the Caldon Canal, along with two others at Stanley Pool and Rudyard Lake. There are actually two adjacent lakes at the site, the upper one being the Serpentine Pool which feeds the lower Knypersley Pool or reservoir.

The Macclesfield Canal passes through mostly green and rural surroundings, with Victorian mills and warehouses along the way adding a distinctive character. It passes through beautiful countryside and touches on several towns – Bollington, Macclesfield, and Congleton. The route of the canal was surveyed by Thomas Telford and construction was engineered by William Crosley. The completed canal was opened on 9th November 1831 at a cost of £320,000.

The Peak Forest Canal is one of Britain’s most scenic waterways, running through the magnificent landscape to the edge of the Peak District. The main objective of the canal was to improve the transportation of bulk manufactured goods and raw materials, particularly limestone from the quarries at Dove Holes, high up in the Peak Forest.

Rudyard Lake is a haven of peace and tranquility, the two-and-a-half-mile-long lake was created more than two centuries ago to supply water for the then-expanding canal system of the West Midlands. The lake is still used for many water activities such as boating, canoeing, fishing and also for walks and recreational steam train trips.

The Shropshire Union Canal is a charmingly rural and isolated waterway for much of its length. With stretches where there are no towns for miles. It runs from the edge of urban Wolverhampton through some of the most underpopulated areas of England to the River Mersey at Ellesmere Port, about sixty miles in all and taking a fairly leisurely four days to cruise.

The Trent & Mersey Canal was the country’s first long-distance canal. It is full of interesting features, which reflect its history. These include the Harecastle Tunnel, the lengthy lock flight known as ‘Heartbreak Hill’, and the traditional canal town of Shardlow. It is a "narrow canal" for the vast majority of its length, but at the extremities to the east of Burton upon Trent and north of Middlewich, it is a wide canal.

Trentabank Reservoir is located within Macclesfield Forest, partly in the Peak District National Park in England, and is home to rich unimproved uplands and grasslands. The reservoir is surrounded mainly by coniferous plantations and is also home to about 22 pairs of herons.