The canals were used to transport bulk goods. We’ve passed canal wharfs for coal, salt, china clay, beer, even sugar and chocolate. Tonight we are at Bugsworth Basin, as the end of the Peak Forest Canal. It’s the largest inland port on the canal system, and it was solely devoted to quicklime and limestone.

Sorry, it doesn’t all fit in one photo.

Limestone is mostly calcium carbonate, CaCO₃. If you heat it you can squeeze out a carbon dioxide molecule, and you are left with calcium oxide, CaO or quicklime. Both have important industrial uses. Limestone is used in steelmaking, as a building material, and to reduce the acidity of soil. Quicklime is used in cement, mortar, and plaster. It can be used for water treatment, soap making, and glassmaking. Also, and this was really important in the early days of urbanization, a little lime sprinkled in a pit toilet reduces the smell dramatically.

Benjamin Franklin conjectured that ingesting lime might similarly ameliorate the unpleasant aroma of flatulence.

But as there are many to whom an entire Vegetable Diet would be inconvenient, and as a little Quick-Lime thrown into a Jakes will correct the amazing Quantity of fetid Air arising from the vast Mass of putrid Matter contain’d in such Places, and render it rather pleasing to the Smell, who knows but that a little Powder of Lime (or some other thing equivalent) taken in our Food, or perhaps a Glass of Limewater drank at Dinner, may have the same Effect on the Air produc’d in and issuing from our Bowels?

Benjamin Franklin, A Letter to a Royal Academy About Farting

Limestone was burned at the basin to produce quicklime which was loaded directly from the lime kilns into the boats. At its peak up to eighty boats a day could be loaded at Bugsworth.

The lime was shipped from the quarry on a tramway, with a gang of up to forty wagons running downhill on rails. The empty carts were hauled up the tramway again by a team of horses. The tramway is now a gently sloping footpath…

… with giant fungi…

… and an inexplicable memorial.