The poet Newton had provided the town with a water supply by having pipes laid at his own expense from the Well Head at the source of the stream which flowed out of an old lead-mine.  Lead in drinking-water has an evil name for causing poisoning, but the Tideswell folk flourish on it, since no one seems to think of dying before seventy, and a goodly number live to over ninety.

They have some small industries, cotton manufacture having spread from Lancashire into these remote districts.  It is an old-fashioned place, with houses mostly stuccoed with broken crystals and limestone from the “Rakes” and containing curiously carved cupboard doors and posts torn from churches ornamented in Jacobean style by the sacrilegious Cromwellians, many of them having been erected just after the Great Rebellion.

[Illustration:  THE DUKE OF BRIDGEWATER.]

[Illustration:  BRIDGE CARRYING THE CANAL OVERHEAD.]

We now journeyed along the mountain track until it descended sharply into Miller’s Dale; but before reaching this place we were interested in the village of Formhill, where Brindley, the famous canal engineer, was born in 1716.  Brindley was employed by the great Duke of Bridgewater, the pioneer of canal-making in England, to construct a canal from his collieries at Worsley, in Lancashire, to Manchester, in order to cheapen the cost of coal at that important manufacturing centre.  It was an extraordinary achievement, considering that Brindley was quite uneducated and knew no mathematics, and up to the last remained illiterate.  Most of his problems were solved without writings or drawings, and when anything difficult had to be considered, he would go to bed and think it out there.  At the Worsley end it involved tunnelling to the seams of coal where the colliers were at work so that they could load the coal directly into the boats.  He constructed from ten to thirteen miles of underground canals on two different levels, with an ingeniously constructed connection between the two.  After this he made the great Bridgewater Canal, forty miles in length, from Manchester to Runcorn, which obtained a fall of one foot per mile by following a circuitous route without a lock or a tunnel in the whole of its course until it reached its terminus at the River Mersey.  In places where a brook or a small valley had to be crossed the canal was carried on artificially raised banks, and to provide against a burst in any of these, which would have caused the water to run out of the canal, it was narrowed at each end of the embankment so that only one boat could pass through at a time, this narrow passage being known as a “stop place.”  At the entrance to this a door was so placed at the bottom of the canal that if any undue current should appear, such as would occur if the embankment gave way, one end of it would rise into a socket prepared for it in the stop-place, and so prevent any water leaving the canal except that in the broken section, a remedy simple but ingenious.  On arriving at Runcorn the boats were lowered by a series of locks into the River Mersey, a double service of locks being provided so that boats could pass up and down at the same time and so avoid delay.