E26 Clyde

At Clyde the canal is really a river wearing a canal’s number. When the waterway was rebuilt to Barge Canal dimensions in the 1910s, engineers abandoned the old hand-dug prism and shifted the channel south into the bed of the Clyde River — so Lock E26, with its slight six-foot lift, meters a natural stream rather than a dug ditch. Watch the numbering: this modern E26 is not the earlier enlarged-era “Lock 53” that served Clyde before it, and the two shouldn’t be conflated. The village around it was a glass town, home to the Clyde Glass Works, which blew window glass along the canal bank from 1828 until 1922 — burning in the fire of 1873 and rebuilt at once. A quiet lock now, on a river most people never realize they’re looking at.