in 1920 the Ministry of Transport made a grant of £11,000 for major repairs to the Banavie locks. The canal closed for nine weeks while the work was carried out. A further stoppage of three months occurred in 1929, when a Drifter (fishing boat) broke through two of the Banavie lock gates, causing flooding. The canal passed into the care of the British Waterways Board in 1962. A programme of mechanising the locks was begun, and all locks were mechanised by 1969. There were several calls to close the canal following accidents in which ships hit lock gates, or masonry collapsed, and by the 1990s the canal was in crisis. Lock walls were bulging and leaking, and the cost of rebuilding the locks and replacing the gates was estimated at £60 million. The money was not available, and so engineers devised another plan, which cost only one third of that. Over ten winters from 1995 to 2005, sections of the canal were drained, and the locks were repaired by drilling holes into the double-skinned walls, after which stainless steel rods were used to stitch the walls together, and huge quantities of grout were used to seal and waterproof the structures. New lock gates were fitted, and where necessary, new stone blocks were cut to make repairs, rather than using concrete. By the end of the project, 16,000 holes had been drilled, 25,000 tons of grout had been used, and the locks were probably in better condition than they had been since they were first built. See also Canals of the United Kingdom History of the British canal system Fonserannes Locks References Bibliography Locks of Scotland Staircase locks