Distance: 4.7 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: easy

Get the route via: Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

Suburban canal walk in the Black Country through lots of green spaces. Takes the Dudley No. 2 Canal towpath from Old Hill Railway Station in Rowley Regis to the Parkhead Basin near Dudley town centre.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Parkhead Basin

Nestled beneath a hillside just west of Dudley town centre, Parkhead is amongst the Black Country town’s most important canal basins.

Today Parkhead Basin, which is home to the deepest lock on the Birmingham Canal Navigations network, is the focal point for Canal Park, a peaceful green space for the surrounding communities. It is cared for and promoted by the Friends of Parkhead Locks an energetic organisation who tend to the waterway, historic canal buildings and greenspaces of the site.

Historically Parkhead would have been an incredibly busy transshipment point, the place where the Stourbridge, Dudley No. 1 and Dudley No. 2 Canals intersected, and where goods were loaded and unloaded. The Stourbridge Canal connects, ultimately, to the River Severn and as far north as Stoke-on-Trent via the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal. While the Dudley Canals, when they were in full operation, linked the Birmingham Main Line Canal at Tipton with Selly Oak in south Birmingham. According to a member of the Friends of Parkhead Locks who I got talking to when I visited, there were once other private canals, connected to factories, collieries and wharfs leading off Parkhead Basin but these are no more having been filled in during the Twentieth Century.

Nowadays the Dudley No. 2 Canal terminates at Halesowen. The south eastern section of the waterway which once ran through the infamous Lapal Tunnel having closed in stages between 1917 and the 1950s. The Dudley No. 1 Canal, by contrast has been fully restored, continuing to run through a tunnel, a true engineering marvel now, and even more so in 1792 when it first opened, right beneath Dudley town centre to where the Black Country Living Museum stands near Tipton. At 2,900.5 metres long, the tunnel is slightly longer than the Netherton Tunnel, which has a towpath and can be walked through, which opened almost a century later in 1858 providing another route across the limestone spine of the Black Country. The original Dudley Canal Tunnel is the second longest navigable tunnel on the UK’s canal network, second only to the Stanage Tunnel beneath the Pennines which links Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire along the Huddersfield Narrow Canal.

The tunnel’s western portal stands at the northern end of the Parkhead Basin. Tours of the tunnel which are cut through the limestone ridges upon which Dudley is situated are run by the Dudley Canal Trust. They offer sailings each day which go through either the original tunnel, or the original and the Netherton Tunnel, the latter journey taking six hours to complete the circuit.

High above Parkhead Basin stands the sturdy brick piers of the Parkhead Viaduct. The current structure opened to railway traffic in 1880 and purportedly encases an earlier wooden structure built in 1850 when mainline trains first reached this part of Dudley. Wood was chosen for constructing the original viaduct because the ground around Parkhead Basin is seriously unstable, an artefact of old mine workings from centuries of intensive coal extract in the Dudley area. This caused problems for the brick built structure throughout the life of the viaduct as despite intensive reinforcement it continued to sink.

The line towards Brierley Hill which the Parkhead Viaduct carried closed to passengers in 1965, but goods traffic continued until 1993 when the line closed entirely. Soon, however, after more than thirty years closure the line will once more carry passengers across Parkhead Basin with work underway to extend the Midland Metro through Dudley and Tipton, and then on to Brierley Hill and the Merry Hill Shopping Centre. The Parkhead Viaduct is being restored and reused as part of this project, which is currently scheduled to be completed between 2026 and 2027.

The Walk

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.

This walk from Old Hill to Parkhead Basin along the Dudley No. 2 Canal begins at Old Hill Railway Station.

Upon alighting the train exit the station via the northbound platform (direction of travel towards Birmingham Snow Hill) and cross the station’s car park.

Once out on the road turn right and walk a short distance uphill.

Soon on the left you come to a gap in the wall leading straight onto the towpath of the Dudley No. 2 Canal immediately after the Gosty Hill Tunnel.

Upon reaching the towpath turn left and begin walking. You continue straight along the towpath for approximately two miles.

Turning onto the towpath there is an interesting array of bridges to walk beneath.

The next section of the walk is generally greener with the bank broken up a bit less frequently by industry and more often by new housing estates. These tend to be very conventional in form and layout, but are usually quite small and integrated with the older buildings around them, providing a more cohesive sense of neighbourhood than is the case for many larger out of town estates.

As I was walking along this section of the canal a blue painted, beautifully tended, narrowboat chugging along at just under the speed I was walking accompanied me much of the way.

Blue painted canal boat sailing along at 2 or 3 miles per hour

A really nice touch is the creatively designed waymarkers, seemingly wrought from iron, which line the route, serving simultaneously as signposts, historical plaques and a public art installation. They are a reminder that many of the lumps and bumps, shady canal inlets and tumbled down creeper snagged walls lining the route, were once places of toil for thousands of workers. Sadly they’re clearly ten to twenty years old now and are falling into disrepair, but they inventively tell the story of the canal’s heritage and the multitude of industries that used to line the route as well as serving a practical purpose assisting travellers traversing the towpath.

A personal favourite amongst the components of this canalside installation was situated on the side of a ruined tollhouse. It comprises a black and white pencil rendering of a man in mid-19th Century workers clobber wielding a spray paint can in place of the tools of his trade, tagging the words “Tollman Was Ere” in hot pink pink on the side of the building. A neat idea with a lot of warmth behind it, which ties the memory and presence of the workers who created and tended the canal, to its present use as a place of leisure, recreation and creative expression.

Metal sculpture of a 19th Century canal worker spray painting the words "Tollman was 'ere" on a brick wall beside the canal

During this section of the walk the wild and dramatic escarpment of the Rowley Hills is in view. The highest point at 271 metres above sea level is Turner’s Hill, which is the highest point in the West Midlands county and bristles with two radio transmitters which are visible from miles around. On a clear day the hills are visible from the Malverns thirty miles away on the other side of Worcestershire.

A short distance further on after a bridge – just after a small newly built housing estate – the canal enters parkland.

Road bridge on the edge of nature reserve

This is Sandwell Council’s Warrens Hall Nature Reserve. It sits on the edge of the large village of Netherton in the Borough of Dudley. Today there is a wild beauty to the Nature Reserve which runs up to the Rowley Hills.

Canal running beside a patch of grass and trees with reeds and trees on the opposite bank

If you look closely at the tops of the mounds where on sunny days picnickers sit, children sit and sunbathers gather black dirt is visible. This is the spoil from the enormous Windmill End Colliery which worked the site up until 1928. That nearly 100 years later it’s waste is still visible in the landscape years of mining created, is testimony to the sheer volume of work that went into driving it’s tunnels 160 metres underground.

In front of the Nature Reserve as you continue along the towpath the remains of wharfs which once enabled boats to dock near the colliery and other industries such as sawmills, foundries and brickworks which once clustered along the banks of the canal in this area.

Today in the tranquil environment of the Nature Reserve with Black Country residents of all ages out relaxing and enjoying themselves by the waterside the area’s heavy industrial past seems very far away. But the entire landscape, that the people enjoy (not least the canal) and the settlements where they live their everyday lives, would not exist without the shadow of this carbon intensive history.

Presently the canal reaches a junction. Here the old meandering line of the Dudley Canal heads off towards the centre of Netherton and a long way round to the 2.9 kilometre long tunnel that takes it beneath Dudley to Tipton and the Birmingham Canal Navigation.

Steps and ramps leading up onto red brick canal bridge

Here turn left and begin walking along the towpath into the centre of Netherton.

You pass through the Bumble Hole Nature Reserve which is managed by Dudley Council.

Having walked through the nature reserve you arrive at a road bridge.

Road bridge across the Dudley Canal in Netherton

On the other side of the bridge you cross a concrete paved area lined with small workshops. Canal boats moor up here.

There are good views here back towards Turner’s Hill.

Past this section, beyond another road bridge, the towpath becomes more conventional in appearance again.

Keep walking along the towpath for several minutes, passing by some fairly recently constructed flats, and an incredibly verdant looking canal boat mooring.

Presently after a sharp bend a third road bridge appears.

Sharp bend in canal next to red brick flats and tree lined banks with road bridge in the distance

Continuing along the line of the canal passing underneath the road bridge which carries a road running up towards Netherton high street.

The canal runs through an area comprising factory units, green space, and housing alike.

Presently you come to a short, but deep cut through a towering limestone ridge, which has a road bridge high above it.

On the far side of the cutting you continue a little further until you come to a bridge across a disused and overgrown branch canal.

Turn right and cross the bridge, carrying on along the towpath on the far side, walking beneath what looks like an old railway bridge.

High above you on your right the tower of Netherton Church is clearly visible, high up above a patch of very varied open scrub land.

You keep walking along the towpath through a very green stretch, now approaching Parkhead Basin and the end of the walk.

Just before you reach the basin you pass through an industrial area, factories which are descended from the original industries which grew up alongside the canal network.

Suddenly you reach the bottom of the Parkhead Locks at the foot of the basin. This lock is the deepest on the Birmingham Canal Navigations network.

Either climb up and walk across the lockgate to get to the towpath on the far side, or head left and cross over the nearby road bridge.

Once on the far side of the canal, now stood upon the Dudley No.1 Canal towpath, turn right to walk up towards the heart of the Parkhead Basin and the mouth of the Dudley Canal Tunnel.

Continue walking straight ahead and beneath the Parkhead Viaduct, to enter Canal Park the greenspace which is situated around the basin.

Once in the park follow the canal up the basin to the far end where amongst trees stands the Dudley Canal Tunnel.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

It is straightforward to get from Parkhead Basin to Dudley town centre where there is a wide array of buses (and from 2025 or 2026 tram services) to destinations across the Black Country, as well as into Birmingham, and railway stations along both the Stour Valley and the Jewellery Lines.

The route to follow is below:

Take one of the paths winding uphill steadily towards the top of the cutting.