Royal Military Canal - parapet path

Image: © Mr Ignavy Taken: 17 Feb 2008

The canal was built to defend England when Napoleon started to mass an army of some 130,000 troops and 2,000 boats on the French coast near Boulogne. It was started on 30 October 1804 but only finished in April 1809, well after Napoleon’s plans for invasion had suffered a major setback following his navy’s defeat at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The journalist William Cobbett, who toured the country on his Rural Rides during the 1820s, was typical of the critics of the canal: ‘Here is a canal made for the length of thirty miles to keep out the French; for those armies who had so often crossed the Rhine and the Danube were to be kept back by a canal thirty feet wide at most!’ The view in the photo is along the north bank parapet which was built up from the excavated soil.

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