If the name “curly whirly” is associated with anywhere in West Midlands county then it is with Bournville in south Birmingham with its connection to Cadbury’s who have made the eponymous sweet since 1970.
On the far side of the county however, winds another venerable institution of a far older vintage upon which the same moniker has been bestowed. The Wyrley and Essington Canal stretches from the centre of Wolverhampton and Walsall out into their southeastern Staffordshire hinterland.
Approved by Parliament in 1792, it is a contour canal following the lie of the land so as to avoid extensive flights of locks and other feats of engineering.
The reason for its construction during the 1790s, and why it still meanders around the towns and villages comprising the Black Country’s north western fringe above Walsall is the demand in Walsall, Wolverhampton and beyond for the coal and clay present in large quantities throughout the area.
This also gave rise to the canal’s twisty and meandering qualities as it winds through small towns and large villages in the West Midlands – Staffordshire borderlands like Little Bloxwich, Fishley, Clayhanger, Brownhills and Wyrley and Essington from which it gets its name, creating a new artery along which raw materials could be sucked into the heart of the West Midlands conurbation. Which in time it did. Though prior to its long proposed amalgamation with the Birmingham Canal Navigation Company in the early 1840s the Wyrley and Essington did not actually have any through connections to the waterways running into Birmingham and central and south western parts of the Black Country.
By the middle of 1797 Lichfield was also connected, opening up a route for transshipment from the Black Country to the Trent and Mersey Canal up to North Western England and the port of Liverpool. The company behind the twisty canal had created a substantial network serving the districts north east of Wolverhampton and Walsall, and its dispersed pattern of settlements, coal mines, clay and other mineral workings. A distinct region, alike the Black Country and wider West Midlands in many ways, but also different from them. The contrast between open fields and woodland with tightly knit little former industrial towns and factory estates is stark.
Well into the middle of the 19th Century even as railways began to mushroom across its catchment area the Wyrley and Essington continued to expand its tentacles as more branch canals were dug. These short waterways which added to the tangled plate of spaghetti that was the company’s network were dug to reach specific mineral deposits and factory sites.
Tens of miles of canal required a lot of water. This led the Wyrley and Essington Company to dam tributaries of the River Tame just south of Burntwood to create the gigantic 90 hectare Chasewater Reservoir. A major intervention in the region’s landscape and ecology, which exists to this day as a popular leisure destination and nature receive.
Towards the end of the 19th Century as the Cannock Chase coalfield north of Chasewater began being fully exploited by new deep level collieries the Wyrley and Essington received a new burst of life due to the shear volume of coal being dug was shipped by canal as well as railway.
However, as the locus of coal mining in south east Staffodshire shifted northwards closer to Cannock Chase itself and towns like Rugeley and Hednesford in the Post War era, this traffic fell away. From the mid-1950s many of the Wyrley and Essington’s branches as well as the main line of the canal beyond Brownhills to Lichfield were abandoned.
In some cases the land was used for housing, in others open cast mining and digging for minerals which continued at scale in the area into the 21st Century, sliced through the canal’s line. This means that today the Canal and Rivers Trust who own and manage the Wyrely and Essington describe it as possessing “peaceful, meandering waters [which] see few boats, but it is popular with walkers, cyclists and anglers”.
However, in common with so many other disused canals across the UK in the Midlands and beyond, there is an active campaign to get the Wyrely and Essington Canal reinstated to its original terminus at Lichfield. It has been running with some success for decades, even getting the builders of the M6 Toll Motorway in the early 2000s to include a nearly 50 metre long aqueduct to nowhere in their construction plans so as to facilitate a potential reopening one day.
So who knows? Maybe the West Midlands other curly whirly will one day be full of life again.