Between 1730 and 1860 a radial system of inland waterways developed in the north of Ireland. As elsewhere in the prerailway age, land transport could bear no comparison with water in regard to facility or cheapness; however, in Ireland the absence of any great mining or manufacturing areas, and consequently of any major areas of high population density, greatly reduced the benefits generally resulting from large-scale inland water transport. Although the earliest inland canal constructed in the British Isles lay in Ulster, it was built to the design and under the direct supervision of an Englishman. Indeed, in matters of canal-engineering generally, as in so many other instances, Ireland suffered by being considered fundamentally similar to Great Britain, and most of her navigations were the work of engineers and surveyors who had previously made their names by the success of their public works in England or Scotland-Richard Castle, Thomas Steers, Robert Whitworth, Davis Ducart, John Smeaton, William Jessop, Thomas Telford, John Rennie, and Francis Giles. The engineering resulting from the visits of these eminent men was for the most part sound and, in more than one instance, of some significance in the general development of canal-engineering, but, unfortunately, failure to grasp the inherent differences between the British and Irish economies left the several waterways to struggle on year after year, sometimes showing a slight profit, but for the most part committed to a regular annual deficit, usually defrayed from public funds. A historical study of the development and decline of a canal system in the north of Ireland not only affords illustration of the complex and unbalanced relationship between public expenditure, as determined by parliamentary policy, and of the specific transport requirements of the area in which those funds were applied, but it also provides insight into several early experiments in canal-engineering which were to acquire no little significance in the wider context of British inland water trans-