Paul Stowe woke at 4.05am on December 22 with an ominous sense that something was wrong. Quite how wrong, he could scarcely have anticipated, until he peered out of his canal boat window to see ‘millions of gallons of water pour past at an extraordinary rate’.
Then he opened the door at the back of his boat to a scene of utter carnage.
The Shropshire waterway, so peaceful when he had fallen asleep, was collapsing before his eyes. The boat moored in front of him had already been pulled from its berth and was now sinking into a ‘deep void’ at a 90-degree angle.
After rushing to wake his wife, Sarah, 55, and their adult son, the three fled the boat in their pyjamas, powerless to do anything but watch in horror as the canal continued to give way and a second boat fell into the opening chasm.
Their own vessel – their home – hung perilously over the precipice.
‘I felt like I was on a movie set,’ says Paul, 55. ‘It was like something out of Titanic, boats upending and falling into the hole. Horrendous.’
Three weeks on, we stare together at the gaping rift caused by the breach in the Llangollen Canal near Whitchurch. The two boats that fell in, Sefton and Ganymede, are still at the bottom of a 50m long crater.
Thankfully, and a little miraculously, a couple in the first boat and an inhabitant of the second escaped unhurt, though with only seconds to spare.
Stranded canal boats wait to be lifted from the bed of the Llangollen Canal after a breach in the embankment on January 13, 2026 in Whitchurch, Shropshire
A couple in the first boat and an inhabitant of the second escaped unhurt, though with only seconds to spare
Paul’s boat, the Pacemaker, meanwhile, survived the drop and was dragged 50ft back to safety by the Canals and Rivers Trust (CRT), the charity in charge of most of our canal network.
More distressing than the thousands it will cost to repair, however, is Paul’s fear that another, worse disaster could strike.
‘By pure luck, no one has lost their life yet,’ he says. ‘But I’m getting really upset about the safety of the waterways. I’m getting angry.’
And the fact is, our canals do appear to be more dangerous than they once were. While the CRT stresses that a breach of this severity is rare, the number of incidents where the embankment of a canal just collapses seems to be increasing.
Last January, after heavy rainfall, the embankment fell away at nearby Bridgewater Canal, draining 1.9 miles of water and forcing 1,000 local people from their homes.
Also, last year, the embankment collapsed on the Huddersfield Canal, causing the entire waterway to close, while in Devon, there was a breach at Stover Canal, leading to a 60m collapse of the embankment.
The fallout can be catastrophic – and eye-wateringly expensive. The breach at Llangollen is expected to cost £2 million to repair and keep the canal closed for a year.
So what exactly is behind these collapses? There is, says CRT’s chief executive Campbell Robb, ‘generally no one reason’. A thorough investigation is underway here, he adds, and he hopes ‘in the next couple of weeks we’ll have some more conclusive ideas’.
Built in the Industrial Revolution, much of England and Wales’ 2,500-mile canal network is now creaking with age. Most canals are lined with puddle clay, six inches to a foot deep, which the Victorians compacted by driving sheep through them ‘to make it as impermeable as possible’, explains Julie Sharman, CRT’s chief operating officer.
While ‘it’s OK for canals to seep’, she says, ‘leakage [out of the canal] can draw the finer material out and create a larger route for the water to pass’. Over time, this can destabilise the soil around the canal.
Breaches can also be caused by ‘overtopping’ – when heavy rain, or human activity, such as a breach in 2018 at Middlewich on the Shropshire Union Canal, caused by people leaving paddle gates on locks open, forces water to spill over the top of the embankment, collapsing the soil on the banks of the canal.
Climate change is also cited as a cause – drought creates cracks in the soil surrounding and underneath canal beds.
A section of the Llangollen Canal in Whitchurch, Shropshire, collapsed on December 22, plunging two narrowboats into a hole on the canal bed and leaving one teetering on the edge, with half a dozen others left stranded
But compounding it all is a lack of funding. Charity, the Inland Waterways Association (IWA) recently reported three-quarters of our waterways face financial peril with water ‘not reliably where it used to be, and also not where it needs to be’.
Indeed, the funding settlement announced by Defra in 2023 amounts to a reduction of more than £300 million in real terms over ten years, according to the CRT.
‘The cost of everything is going up,’ says Robb. ‘Of course, we could always spend more money, but we’re doing a good job at looking after it at the moment.’
The boat owners I meet question this. Paul, living in rented accommodation as he awaits the fate of his boat, isn’t convinced climate change is to blame either.
This area of canal was inspected weeks before the breach, he says, and ‘between it being given the OK and the breach, there wasn’t any catastrophic weather. So either the inspection was inadequate, or something was known that hasn’t been reported.’
A spokesman for the CRT says a full inspection of this canal took place last April, with a further inspection last November, by professionally certified colleagues and specialist engineers. Neither raised undue concerns.
‘There is no way we’d put boaters or the local community knowingly at risk,’ they add.
As water continued to break the canal’s bank last December, Paul says he ‘grabbed two firemen’ to help him find ‘stop planks’ – removable wood or steel planks fitted into vertical grooves in canals to stop the flow of water in emergencies. ‘They should be at each major junction. They’re normally at bridges and locks.’
Yet at both bridges nearest the breach, he says, ‘the stop plank holds were empty.
‘We probably lost two to three hours because the stop planks weren’t available.’
The CRT tells me that stop planks are not kept at ‘every bridge’ but at strategic points, and on the night in question were brought from ‘nearby’ Ellesmere Yard, a 15-minute drive away, in a situation where every second counts.
Paul and Sarah bought their 60ft boat for £72,000 18 months ago, swapping their listed cottage in St Ives for a ‘more relaxed’ life on the water.
They had only moored at Llangollen Canal two days earlier for some last-minute Christmas shopping.
A pragmatic man, Paul says the breach was the first time in his life he didn’t feel he could ‘fix’ a problem. ‘It was pandemonium.’
The Canal and River Trust has said six grounded boats have been re-floated, and efforts will soon begin to recover the remaining three vessels
He watched Bob Wood jump from his boat, Sefton, seconds before it fell. ‘As he stood on the bank, the boat went. If he hadn’t woken, would we have seen Bob again? I don’t know.’
Paul doubts his insurance will cover damage to his boat, and just lifting it from the water to take it to a repair yard for inspection will cost him around £5,000. But he’s not the only one despairing.
Those on vessels on the 30-mile stretch of canal to the east of the breach are effectively stuck here until it is repaired.
They include gardener Kevin Ringer, 53, whom I find on his boat at Ellesmere, 11 miles away.
‘I can’t get off this canal until they’ve fixed that breach,’ he says. ‘They’ve said it could be a year, but I suspect that’s optimistic. I think this could have been avoided if they’d maintained the canals properly. I don’t think they do any more,’ he tells me.
In Stourport, Worcestershire, where he recently cruised, he says, ‘the state of the canal is shocking’. ‘Locks are in a terrible state; they’re leaking so badly. Sometimes I didn’t even know if I was going to get through.’
The CRT says it prioritises maintenance works, having assessed the canal network according to the damage which would occur were it to fail, so ‘it would be inappropriate to conflate the condition of a lock with the condition of an embankment as they have different consequences of failure and would be inspected and prioritised for repair completely differently’.
For Paul Stowe, meanwhile, the challenge is to convince his wife to return to their boat once it’s deemed safe.
It’s a tough ask, he says, staring into the abyss his family nearly fell down, ‘especially as I’m struggling to convince myself’.