Sighing to the workhouse

This must have been a most miserable passageway 150 years ago.
The Victorians of the town of Stone lived and enjoyed themselves on the east side of the river, so, on the west, they built the local Workhouse, in which the desperately poor were housed.
To access the workhouse from the comfortable side of town, the poverty-stricken had to pass through this passageway under a small bridge.  A bridge of sighs.

 

After the end of the Poor Laws, the old workhouse became a hospital, and is now - by a curious twist of fate -, luxury apartments!

Wall/bridge/lock/road/canal/path

This road-bridge on the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal (1770) is Grade-2 listed, believe it or not - though it was built by Brindley, so does deserve its bit of fame. And it is strangely elegant.
The odd arrangement you see here the because of the challenge set to Brindley to build a lock and bridge in one structure - he always loved a challenge!
If you want to go look for it, it's no 49 on the canal and is to be found in Awbridge (Trysull).
 

Big enough for a horse

Gailey Top Lock has a full two-tunnel structure near it, with the pedestrian tunnel as big as the canal tunnel - which is fairly rare.
The pedestrian tunnel (we are on the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal here) can actually easily accommodate any horse drawing a boat; yet often the horse was walked over the bridge and back down to the path because the tunnel for pedestrians would be too small for it.

Canal makers stream through

The makers of the Shropshire Union Canal believed in going the straight line - so they cut their way through hills, banks, water-courses and the like, rarely veering. 
They were of so fixed a mind to go headlong through natural features that 'Double Culvert Bridge' (number 40) near Norbury, as well as having the canal underneath it, even has to carry the original natural stream of the locality through and along it.

See also: High Bridge

Smallest telegraph pole

Another curiosity of Staffordshire (there are so many!) concerns the odd structure that you see here in the opening just under the bridge's top.
It is a telegraph pole... which Wikipedia says holds the record for the UK's smallest telegraph pole - maybe the world's.

The pole was placed there in the 1860s as part of a string of telegraph wires and poles along the Shropshire Union Canal, and this is the only one of them to survive.  Without its wires nowadays...

If you want to glimpse it yourself, you'll need to get on the canal near the village of Woodseaves and head for 'High Bridge'.
By the way, this part of the canal is in a deep cleft, which is why the bridge is so high, supporting the road that passes over it from ridge to ridge.  The bolstering extra arch - on which the pole is placed - had to be inserted because the strain on the walls was so great.

Canal crosses canal

The Hazlehurst Aqueduct by the Hollybush pub at Denford carries one canal over the top of another, and has been doing so since 1841, as the plaque indicates.
The fact that there is a plaque there, and the fine appearance of the aqueduct itself, gives a hint of the pride the engineers must have felt in building it.

Under it, according to the story recounted in Pint Sized History Of The Staffordshire Moorlands, James Brindley, who designed the structure, had one day come back to Denford to admire his work – and he caught a chill. He died of it.  Hmm.

Incidentally, don't confuse this structure with the Hazlehurst Junction bridges, which are further down the Caldon Canal.

Turnover Bridge

Turnover Bridge, as it’s called, crosses the Trent & Mersey Canal at Meaford (near Stone).
It’s called Turnover, because the path switches from one side of the canal to the other, and you have to cross the bridge to ‘turn over’ to the other side…