Horses and mules carrying Iron moved far too slowly for the Ironmasters liking and carts were too small. So the Ironmasters created The Glamorganshire canal to transport Iron from Merthyr to Cardiff by using trows which were boats which were pulled by horses on a towpath.
The Crawshays invested over £13,000 initially
to make the canal,but it cost £103,600 in the end, but Richard Crawshay was delighted. The trows could hold up five tons of iron, The trows were about sixty feet long and nine feet wide.
Building the canal was a very difficult, every canal needs wharves, locks, bridges and aqueducts all the work was done by hand, there were no bulldozers. Gangs of labourers or navigators or 'navvies' for short were hired.
The biggest problem was constructing locks. A lock is a watertight chamber which allows barges to transfer from one level to another a bit like a staircase.
But by 1799 there were five other canals covering a total of 77 miles in south Wales, trade began to flourish.