Since seeing Little_Mike's pictures from his explorations of this drain I'd been keen to see it for myself. I knew it was short, but it looked like somewhere I'd really enjoy spending a few hours, it was. Yes it's short and yes it's not built on a grand scale, but it has that aged and haggered charm about it. It took fifteen minutes to walk the entire culvert from outfall to infall, without stopping other than for the occasional trouser hoiking (no belt). If you don't like culverts with debris fields then this one isn't for you, I had many an ankle crunching moment.

The watercourse is the Ford Green Brook, a tributary of the River Trent. It was culverted on the site of the Chatterley Whitfield colliery, Stoke-on-Trent, the owners of which then proceeded to heap 75metres(!) of mining spoil on top of it. No wonder it's seriously failing. At about a kilometre long it has three main forms of construction, brick arch (the original culvert), trippy cone shaped concrete arch (60s or 70s extension), and a short section of circular rcp used to re-line a collapsed portion of the brick arch. From the outfall heading upstream the concrete arch runs straight for about 200 metres until you hit a small concrete junction chamber where a smaller tributary of the brook would likely have once joined, either that or it is speculated that this may have been the joining point of a spillway from the mine pumps.

Although the joining pipe has some water flow this seemed to be mostly groundwater seeping in at various points. Following this joining pipe you quickly reached its end, where it is breeze blocked off. In front of the breeze blocks is a grate, similar to those on the infall and outfall of the main pipe, suporting the thought that this was once the infall of a joining drainage channel or tributary. Much searching by Little_Mike has turned up no real evidence aboveground to support this however and so it's unproven. The side pipe is of the same construction as the section from the outfall to the chamber, unsurprisingly it has areas of significant collapse.

From the junction heading upstream the concrete arch of the main pipe continues a little way, with curious steel brackets set into the top of the arch along one side that possibly carried cabling during the extension works. It soon transitions, on a corner, into the original brick culvert. I spent quite a while here, I had a bit of a backlit picture taking extravaganza.

The brick arch was by far my favourite stretch of this culvert. It's so crusty! The floor was diabolical to walk on, varying from a barely ankle deep, debris choked trickle to clear run, knee deep sections. It was in these rare debris free sections that I saw several fish, all about 10 - 15cm long, I'm pretty sure they were gudgeon. On another particularly encrusted bend I stopped to take a couple more pics while pondering the odds for complete failure of the tunnel!

The RCP section is a bit of a stoop, but nothing severe. Once out and back in the brick arch it seemed like no time at all until daylight was invading. The infall is a nice little spot, very chilled. The grill is all but obscured by massive amounts of collected clutter and plant matter hurled on to it during times of more substantial water flow. My initial walk from end to end without a stop had taken fifteen minutes. My walk back to the outfall taking pictures as I went took two hours, it was really good fun, I definitely felt way more relaxed under Stoke-On-Trent than I did aboveground. The valley and site of the Colliery are being transformed into parkland, the plan is to re-direct the Ford Green Brook back out of the culvert through a new open channel and then seal the current culvert. If or when that will happen is uncertain.

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