Alan Barnes discovers a once-important inland port that has slowly come back to life after thirty years of voluntary effort.

A request to prepare a portfolio of photographs featuring canalside inns and pubs was too good an opportunity to miss - after all how many times do you get the chance to go on a sponsored pub crawl?

It was during my search for suitable hostelries that I happened almost by chance on the Navigation Inn at the end of a short arm of the Peak Forest Canal in the small village of Buxworth, Derbyshire.

	Portrayed here at the height of its life, the Upper Basin at Bugsworth is a scene of bustling activity. To the right of the limeshed, wagons wait for their loads of gritstone setts to be trans-shipped, perhaps to the boat moored in the foreground.

The Navigation has been an inn for over 200 years and was once owned by Pat Phoenix, aka Elsie Tanner of TV’s Coronation Street. It serves a fine range of local and guest ales and the food is excellent. However, what sets this pub apart from most canalside locations is that it sits overlooking one of the most important industrial archaeological sites in the UK. Bugsworth Basin is a Scheduled Ancient Monument and was once the site of one of the largest inland ports in the country. Over the past 30 years volunteers of the Inland Waterways Protection Society have worked to restore some of the fabric of the basin and to record in detail the archaeology of the site.

The work culminated in an attempt in 1998 to re-open the basin to boat traffic from the Peak Forest Canal but problems were encountered with severe water loss and leakage and so after only a few months the basin was forced to close again in October 1999. Since then the IWPS have worked to raise funds to deal with the problem. Working in conjunction with British Waterways, English Heritage and the High Peak Borough Council, plans were formed with the aim of securing the long-term future of the site and nearly £1m has been raised to fund the restoration of the basin. Construction work on the latest phase of the work at Bugsworth began in November 2003 when contractors moved in to begin the complex task of solving the problem of the basin’s water leakage. This work will be done throughout the winter and the re-opening of the basin to boat traffic is scheduled for the spring.

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