What a brilliant place to wake up to!
Then it was on to the Bingley 5 Rise.
This fabulous set of locks is the steepest flight of locks in the UK, with a gradient of about 1:5 (a rise of 59ft 2in (18.03m) over a distance of 320 ft) with the intermediate and bottom gates being the tallest in the country.
Staircase, or riser locks, are locks where the bottom gates of one lock form the top gates of the next lock.
When the locks were opened in 1774 a crowd of 30,000 people turned out to celebrate. The first boat to use the locks took just 28 minutes.
The technology of riser locks, was out-of-date by the 1770s, when they were built.
Riser locks on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal were probably used to keep costs down as the project was financed privately.
Riser locks use much more water than conventional ones as boats cannot pass in them. As trade increased, the five-rise locks at Bingley created a constant water supply problem for the canal company. Consideration was given to replacing them with an incline plane or separate locks, but the options were never financially viable.
