The Aberdeenshire Canal

For the first few miles out of Aberdeen, there are no physical remains of the canal to be found. The canal originally started on Waterloo Quay at the harbour, and wound its way up to Kittybrewster. This section was converted to railway use after the rest of the canal, with the railway following the exact route of the canal. There has been some debate over whether some retaining walls on the route of the railway are in fact the remains of locks, but there seems to be no conclusive evidence either way.

After the canal/railway pass under Bedford Street, their routes diverge, with the line of the canal running alongside Powis Terrace, the turnpike. Nothing seems to remain, but I did notice at the south end of the terrace of tenements built on the line of the canal sometime in the 19th century, there is a grassed area behind an old wall, with a very pronounced drop of a few feet on it. I couldn't help but wonder afterwards if it had maybe been the forgotten remains of a lock, but I dunno. Between the boat house (see below) and the site of Kittybrewster railway station (between the refuse depot and Kittybrewster retail park) there were no less than five locks, so it could well be a remenant.

Further up, at the junction of Saint Machar Drive and Powis Terrace (which turns into Great Northern Road) there was, until fairly recently, an old building with filled in doorways and windows that was believed to be the old boat house, where passengers would disembark - the journey further south was very slow, due to all the locks - fourteen between here and the terminus at Waterloo Quay. Sadly, this much modified but highly historical building has been swept away thanks to the construction of a new roundabout. I was disappointed to see that it had gone, as I remember noticing it as a kid, but that's progress for you...

Past Saint Machar Drive, the canal continued to run adjacent to the turnpike road, the site of which is now under various 1920s bungalows and post-war flats. after the point where Road bisected the turnpike, the canal curved away from it, apparently running alongside Canal Street in Woodside. Until the 1980s, the boundary of the canal was marked out by the properties that ran along the north side of Great Western Road, but these were pulled down to make way for the dualling of Great Western Road, and the land has since been reused. In this area, an archeological dig took place to find remains of the canal, but I know very little about this dig, and what if any reamins were found.

But it's along the Great Western Road that the first tangible remains of the Aberdeenshire canal can be found. A bridge spanning the canal lies just north of Great Western Road, on the entrance to Woodside's Station Road. This bridge is a rare survivor, being the only bridge to span the canal that still exists, although the foundations of others may still lay underneath the roads they once ran under. The bridge has survived both the expansion of Woodside in the late 19th century and the widescale demolition that hit the area when Great Northern Road was dualled, and so its survival is all the more remarkable.