Husbands Bosworth Tunnel

23.4 miles from West Bridge Leicester.

Over the northern portal of Husbands Bosworth Tunnel its length is
given on an engraved stone as 1,166 yards 2 feet, and on a modern
plate as 1,170 yards. Mr Bevan's record of construction gives the
length as 1,180 yards, but on a survey by Mr Milner in 1893 it was
found to be 1,1703/4 yards. At least two of the 100 yard distance stones
were set upside down. Eight shafts were used during its construction;
the brickwork was completed on the 29th April 1813 and on the completion of the deep cutting beyond on the 25th May, the navigation
was opened to Stanford and Welford Mill.
George Smith of Coalville, relating a journey in the Midland Counties Carrying Company's boat Ouse in 1880, in his book Canal Adventures by Moonlight, tells how "in going through this tunnel we came in contact with half-a-dozen laden coal boats, connected with which there would be some twelve or fourteen men, whose language and manner in some respects were nearly equal to those of the cannibals". After leaving the tunnel "The canal, as we sailed away, in many places now presented a more lovely and picturesque sight, and deserves a much better title than the 'Grand Union Ditch' as the con-temptuous captain of the Ouse referred to it). Here it seemed to be a union of all that was lovely and enchanting, and not, as in other places, a union of poverty, misery and wretchedness." Though much of his life seems to have been spent looking for 'dirt and ignorance' on the cut, for once he must have been delighted by the scene when they emerged into the wooding cutting at the northern end of the tunnel.
The tunnel lies beneath the Market Harborough to Rugby railway line (now closed), and the railway is in turn crossed by a bridge for the boat-horse path over the tunnel.



1930 photograph includes; south end, showing Charlie Woodhouse's horse boat emerging from the tunnel.

Roll your mouse over the image below to compare then and now images

Image taken: circa 1930,

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