Traditional Craft of the River Mersey & Related Waterways

Mersey flats, Weaver packets, Dukers - by Tony Lewery.

The characteristic carrying craft of the waterways linked to the Mersey estuary were the Mersey 'flats', deep sided barges about seventy feet long by fourteen feet wide.

By the time the Duke of Bridgewater started building his innovatory canal from his mines in Worsley to the market at Manchester in the 1760's various shapes and sizes of sailing flats were already at work in the area, on the Mersey and Irwell Navigations, the River weaver, River Dee and the Sankey Brook Canal. The Duke therefore sensibly designed his canal extension from Manchester to Runcorn to accommodate these local boats, and his flight of locks at Runcorn effectively set the gauge for the area's interconnecting waterways, the Rochdale Canal, the Chester Canal and, much later, the lowest Liverpool section of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.

Mersey Flats were originally carvel built round-bilged sailing barges, with a single mast rigged fore and aft with a gaff mainsail and large jib to the stem head. Masts could be lowered or lifted out for upriver work, whilst a few bigger ones were fitted with a mizzen mast and ventured out to sea as small coasters, to Wales and the Furness Peninsular.

Abobe Right - Steel dumb barge Bigmere on tow on the Manchester Ship Canal in 1977, travelling to Ellesmere Port where she was to become one of the display galleries of the Boat Museum.
Canal flats were built with the same general hull characteristics, but were unrigged, designed to be pulled by horses or tugs, but still strong and seaworthy enough to navigate the deep water Mersey to the docks at Liverpool. Early River Weaver flats were rather smaller, but improvements to the river and the prosperity of the salt trade led to the eventual development of a class of much bigger steam powered flats, the Weaver 'packets' towing one or two dumb flats behind them. In the 1890's the new docks of the Manchester Ship Canal offered new work for the Mersey flats, lightering goods out of the ships into the local canals. A new class of motorised steel barge was built by the Bridgewater Canal Company as late as the 1950's for this work, and this 'Duker' fleet of power barges and dumb lighters only finished carrying to Kelloggs in 1974.
Above Right - The Duker fleet of Bridgewater canal flats awaiting disposal at Frodsham Mill on the River Weaver in 1977.
The classic wooden flats however had been taken out of service long before that. Most were broken up, but many were sunk out of the way in side basins at Runcorn and Chester. Two now remain afloat as representatives of a class of thousands, the bluff-bowed 'Oakdale' at the Liverpool Maritime Museum, and the more graceful canal flat Mossdale at the Ellesmere Port Boat Museum. Neither was ever worked under sail (although the Oakdale is rigged to look as of she did) but the Mossdale preserves the details and lines of her sailing cousins very well.
She is now very old for she was built originally as the Ruby for the Shropshire Union Canal in the 1870's and remained with them until they finished carrying in 1921. Today she is one of the most important historic craft in the north west of England, and although in the care of the museum, and thus safe from immediate destruction, this fine little ship is in desperate need of much serious and expensive restoration work. At present there is little prospect of this money being found, and she continues to deteriorate.
The wooden Mersey flat Mossdale dry docked at Hunts Lock, Northwich in 1976 before moving to her present museum mooring at Ellesmere Port where she awaits extensive restoration.

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