Bingley Five-Rise Locks is a staircase lock on the

Leeds and Liverpool Canal The Leeds and Liverpool Canal is a canal in Northern England, linking the cities of Leeds and Liverpool. Over a distance of , crossing the Pennines, and including 91 locks on the main line. The Leeds and Liverpool Canal has several small branc ...

Bingley Bingley is a market town and civil parish in the metropolitan borough of the City of Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. It is sited on the River Aire and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. The town had a population of 18,040 at the United Kingdom ...

(). As the name implies, a boat passing through the lock is lifted or lowered in five stages.

Description

In effect the five-rise consists of five locks connected without intermediate "ponds": the lower gate of each chamber forms the upper gate of the chamber below. There are therefore five chambers, and six gates. As the Leeds Liverpool canal is a wide canal, the chambers are slightly more than wide, and each gate consists of two half-gates, "hinged" from opposite sides of the canal. Each half gate is slightly more than wide, so that the two halves close in a "V" shape (pointing "upstream"). Water pressure on the uphill side of the gate keeps it tightly closed until the water levels on either side are equal, when the gate can be opened and the boat moved to the next chamber (see

canal locks A lock is a device used for raising and lowering boats, ships and other watercraft between stretches of water of different levels on river and canal waterways. The distinguishing feature of a lock is a chamber in a permanently fixed position i ...

for more information on how a lock is constructed and operated). The five-rise is the steepest flight of locks in the UK, with a gradient of about 1:5 (a rise of over a distance of ). The intermediate and bottom gates are the tallest in the country. Because of the complications of working a staircase lock and because so many boaters (both first-time hirers and new owners) are inexperienced, a full-time lock keeper is employed and the locks are padlocked out of hours. Barry Whitelock, the lock keeper, worked here for almost 30 years, becoming closely associated with the flight. Barry was awarded an MBE in the 2007 New Year Honours List for "Services to Inland Waterways in the North" and retired in 2017 as the country's longest-serving lock keeper. The locks also have an overflow 'by-wash' at the side, which water runs down when the lock is not open. When a descending boat enters each lock chamber the water level rises slightly and the excess flows via an overflow channel at the side which runs into the main by-wash. The structure is Grade I listed. Bingley 5-rise Locks - geograph

History

The five-rise opened on 21 March 1774 and was a major feat of engineering at the time. When the locks and therefore the canal from

Gargrave Gargrave is a large village and civil parish in the county of North Yorkshire, England. It is located along the A65 road, A65, north-west of Skipton. The village is situated on the very edge of the Yorkshire Dales; the River Aire and the Leeds ...

to Thackley was opened in 1774, a crowd of 30,000 people turned out to celebrate. The first boat to use the locks took just 28 minutes. The first trip was described in the '' Leeds Intelligencer''. The smaller Bingley Three Rise Locks opened at the same time just a few hundred yards downstream.

Tourism

The staircase is a tourist attraction in the area. Boats that pass through often attract a crowd of gongoozlers.

Maintenance

The staircase underwent extensive restoration in 2004 and again in 2006, when the lock gates and paddles were replaced. As is expected with such a feat of engineering it requires a lot of maintenance and is often on British Waterways' list of winter stoppages for maintenance. In January 2012 the locks were drained to allow the installation of new lock gates. The new gates are made of English green

oak An oak is a hardwood tree or shrub in the genus ''Quercus'' of the beech family. They have spirally arranged leaves, often with lobed edges, and a nut called an acorn, borne within a cup. The genus is widely distributed in the Northern Hemisp ...

and, taken together with the

balance beam The balance beam is a rectangular artistic gymnastics apparatus and an event performed using the apparatus. The apparatus and the event are sometimes simply called "beam". The English abbreviation for the event in gymnastics scoring is BB. The bal ...

, weigh more than 5 tonnes.

References

External links