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A walk along the Llangollen Canal between Llangollen and Berwyn on 7 September 2023.

Bridge 48 (suffixed AW) is within a few hundred metres of Berwyn, beyond which the canal continues for around a kilometre to the feed from the River Dee at the Horseshoe Falls.

The Llangollen Canal, only so designated for the first time in the 1980s, was part of the Shropshire Union Canals (SUC) system, built to carry goods and minerals from sites around Trefor, where a basin was constructed just north of the Pontycysllte Aqueduct, completed in 1805.

At that time it had been intended that water for the canal would be supplied by a reservoir that had been constructed in 1786 in the Moss Valley near Wrexham, but little work was ever done on the intended canal route via Ruabon and Brymbo to Chester. In 1808 it was decided to take a feed from the River Dee near Llantisilio, two miles west of Llangollen, and hence this feeder, never fully navigable for the last mile.

Although there were reasonable levels of traffic to Llangollen until after World War I, records suggest that by 1937 the whole section from the junction with the rest of the system at Frankton was disused, and it was formally abandoned in 1944. That was not the end as the whole channel was the main feeder for the rest of the SUC, and it was also used to supply the Mid and South-east Cheshire Water Board. Fortunately it survived long enough to become an integral part of the leisure waterways boom that got under way in the late 1940s.