Lock Yard
Local landowner Lord Cloncurry (1773–1853) was a canal enthusiast, constructing the Lyons mill and lockyard village complex in the 1820s and serving as chairman of the Grand Canal Company five times during his lifetime. The canal was an important, if slow, passenger thoroughfare feeding passenger’s to John Barry’s hotel at Lyons.
| Historical population | ||
|---|---|---|
| Year | Pop. | ±% |
| 1821 | 536 | — |
| 1831 | 158 | −70.5% |
| 1841 | 379 | +139.9% |
| 1851 | 308 | −18.7% |
| 1861 | 310 | +0.6% |
| 1871 | 288 | −7.1% |
| 1881 | 286 | −0.7% |
| 1891 | 222 | −22.4% |
| 1901 | 172 | −22.5% |
| 1911 | 163 | −5.2% |
When in 1834 Flyboats increased the average speed for passenger boats from 3 mph (4.8 km/h) to 9 mph (14 km/h) Ireland’s first railway was already under construction. The canal peaked at 120,615 passengers in 1846, the year construction started on the Dublin-Cork railway line. When a Dublin-Galway railway line was opened in 1850 the closure of the rarely-profitable passenger service followed in 1852.
Cargo traffic continued to use the canal for another 108 years, peaking at 379.045 tons in 1865 when an average of 90 barges a day passed through Ardclough. The canal was motorised 1911-24 and closed to cargo in 1960, but is still a popular thoroughfare for leisure boats. The tracks of the ropes of the horse drawn barges can still be traced at Ardclough canal bridge.
Read more about this topic: Lyons Hill
Famous quotes containing the words lock and/or yard:
“Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains; and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,—these eat up the hours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Look, we’re all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house—in the bedroom he’s asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he’s rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he’s paying his taxes, in the yard he’s raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he’s making a bomb to blow it all up.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)