Eric Robson's Ulverston...

The very best place from which to start your explorations of Ulverston and get a real sense of this once industrial town is Canal Foot where Britain's shortest, deepest and, arguably, least successful canal empties to the sea. If you don't share my passion for canals you don't know what you're missing. For a time the cut at Ulverston was a vision of trade and prosperity. Half close your eyes and look back along the canal towards the town and the canal basin and you can imagine the shipyards and sailmakers, the ropeworks and manufactories that once crowded its towpaths. And then, if you imagine hard enough, you may hear the distant whistle of a locomotive of the Furness Railway hauling a train of iron ore to the altogether grander deep water harbour that was developing at Barrow.

The railway had arrived in 1846 exactly 50 years after the canal opened and did for it in short order. Ulverston's canal promoters were already having problems with the shifting sands of the Leven Estuary and had resorted to desperate measures. If you're lucky on your visit to Ulverston and catch the right point of the tide you may be treated to a glimpse of the town's civil engineering marvel. Collins Weir is a curving embankment of hewn stone blocks that runs for a mile out into the estuary. It was designed to help drive the shifting deep water channel back to the sea lock of the canal. It worked for a while. So much so that one year in the mid 1840s almost 1000 ships used the Ulverston Canal. But the only long term winner would be the silt washed down the River Leven and the sand rolling in from Morecambe Bay. The weir was gradually buried and these days just occasionally appears like a stone ghost beckoning unwary travellers out to sea.