half. The landowners as a body cheerfully accepted this arrangement, while Telford threw himself body and soul into both enterprises with a patriotic even greater than his customary professional zeal.
The chief roads in the highlands and northern counties of Scotland had been made after the rebellions of 1715 and 1745 purely for military purposes, and were quite inadequate as means of general communication. The usefulness, such as it was, of these military roads was moreover marred by the absence of bridges: for instance, over the Tay at Dunkeld and the Spey at Fochabers, these and other principal rivers having to be crossed by ferry-boats, always inconvenient and often dangerous. In mountainous districts the people were scattered in isolated clusters of miserable huts, without possibility of intercommunication, and with no industry so profitable as the illicit distillation of whisky. ‘The interior of the county of Sutherland being inaccessible, the only track lay along the shore among rocks and sands, which were covered by the sea at every tide.’ In eighteen years, thanks to the indefatigable energy of Telford, to the prudent liberality of the government, and to the public spirit of the landowners, the face of the Scottish highlands and northern counties was completely changed. Nine hundred and twenty miles of good roads and 120 bridges were added to their means of communication. In his survey of the results of these operations and of his labours on the Caledonian canal Telford speaks not merely as an engineer, but as a social economist and reformer. Three thousand two hundred men had been annually employed, and taught for the first time the use of tools. ‘These undertakings,’ he said, ‘may be regarded in the light of a working academy, from which eight hundred men have annually gone forth improved workmen.’ The plough of civilisation had been substituted for the former crooked stick, with a piece of iron affixed to it, to be drawn or pushed along, and wheeled vehicles carried the loads formerly borne on the backs of women. The spectacle of habits of industry and its rewards had raised the moral standard of the population. According to Telford, ‘about 200,000l. had been granted in fifteen years,’ and the country had been advanced ‘at least a century.’
The execution of Telford's plans for the improvement of Scottish harbours and fishing stations followed on the successful inception of his road-making and bridge-building. Of the more important of his harbour works, that at the great fishery station Wick, begun in 1808, was the earliest, while about the latest which he designed was that at Dundee in 1814. Aberdeen, Peterhead, Banff, Leith, the port of Edinburgh, are only a few of his works of harbour extension and construction which did so much for the commerce and fisheries of Scotland, and in some cases his labours were facilitated by previous reports on Scottish harbours made by Rennie [see Rennie, John, 1783–1821], whose recommendations had not been carried out from a lack of funds. In this respect Telford was more fortunate, considerable advances from the fund accumulated by the commissioners of forfeited estates in Scotland being made to aid local contributions on harbour works.
Of Telford's engineering enterprises in Scotland the most conspicuous, but far from the most useful, was the Caledonian canal. Though nature had furnished for it most of the water-way, the twenty or so miles of land which connected the various fresh-water lochs forming the main route of the canal, some sixty miles in length, stretched through a country full of engineering difficulties. Moreover the canal was planned on an unusually large scale, for use by ships of war; it was to have been 110 feet wide at the entrance. From the nature of the ground at the north-eastern and south-western termini of the canal immense labour was required to provide basins from which in all twenty-eight locks had to be constructed from the entrance locks at each extremity, so as to reach the highest point on the canal a hundred feet above high-water mark. Between Loch Eil, which was to be the southernmost point of the canal, and the loch next to it on the north, Loch Lochy, the distance was only eight miles, but the difference between their levels was ninety feet. It was necessary to connect them by a series of eight gigantic locks, to which Telford gave the name of ‘Neptune's Staircase.’ The works were commenced at the beginning of 1804, but it was not until October 1822 that the first vessel traversed the canal from sea to sea. It had cost nearly a million sterling, twice the amount of the original estimate. Still worse, it proved to be almost useless in comparison with the expectations which Telford had formed of its commercial promise. This was the one great disappointment of his professional career. His own theory for the financial failure of the canal was that, while he had reckoned on a very profitable trade in timber to be conveyed from the Baltic to the western ports of Great Britain and to Ireland, this hope was defeated by the policy of the government and of parliament in levying an almost prohibitory duty on Baltic
