Rethis Canal

The Rethis Canal is the largest canal in Kinilan, connecting the city of Rethis in the Iron Hills and Antius, the capital.

Architecture

The Rethis Canal, like most Kinilani canals, consists of a wide, generally straight water channel, lined with two wide roads that are used as towpaths. The route is dotted with stables, retractable bridges, and pull-ins for barges too wide to pass in the main channel. Lock systems are positioned as needed, primarily in the Iron Hills, and there is one 60 kilometer long segment where the entire canal and towpaths are suspended on a large aqueduct that spans a particularly rough stretch of the Hills that would have otherwise necessitated the construction of hundreds of locks.
The channel itself is lined with granite, quarried from a variety of sources and transported to the construction site using the completed segments of the canal. It is built at a slight but consistent angle, allowing the water to slowly flow towards Antius, both as a means of keeping the canal clean and to allow for easier transport of the heavy metal shipments from Rethis to Antius.
The towpaths running on either side of the canal were originally fairly narrow dirt tracks, but modernization efforts in the 1500s AE replaced this with a 5 meter wide road of crushed stone, kept contained using a wooden barricade on one side and the lip of the canal's stone lining on the other. This material is more comfortable for hauling teams, but more importantly, does not become an impassable mudhole in heavy rains, and was produced in the iron Hills as a byproduct of their mining operations.
Every 20 kilometers, there are waystations built alongside the canal. At each station, there is a stable for horses, an inn (converted from the bunkhouse used for prisoners sentanced to work the hauling lines), and a floating bridge 3 meters wide that can be pushed out onto the canal and pulled back out as needed. Most of these also feature a pull-in - areas where the canal bulges out on one side to twice its normal width, which allows wide barges to pass at these regular intervals. Around these waystations, there is usually a small farm producing hay and straw for the horses they house.
The Kinilan heartland is level enough to make locks fairly rare, but the Iron Hills generally have two or three between each waystation. Most of these locks use a relatively simple system to raise and lower the water levels - each has a series of metal tanks on each side that can be raised and lowered by use of a gravity reversal enchantment built into the mechanism of the locks. With the tanks raised, they drain into the lock and raise the water level; when lowered, the lock drains into the tanks, dropping to its lower level.
The Canal Bridge in the Iron Hills is the one thing that truly sets the Rethis Canal apart from the rest of KInilan's canal network - 60 kilometers long, 40 meters wide, bypassing some of the worst terrain in the Hills, it's an impressive and clearly magically enhanced construct. The design consists of tall stone pillars that spread out to form broad arches, on which a second tier of smaller arches is built. Each piece has been magically stoneshaped to merge with eachother and reinforced to be far stronger than normal stone. Lining the outer side of both towpaths is a latticework of steel railing a meter and a half high - both to keep people from falling from the bridge and to blind the horses to the fact that they stand sometimes more than 50 meters above the surface. Below the bridge is a series of particularly rough hills valleys, ravines - terrain rough enough to make it inconvenient on foot, let alone for building a canal. The bridge supports two waystations that extend out from the sides of the bridge, including all of the amenities offered by normal waystations

Founding Date

Completed 1426 AE

Type

Canal

Parent Location

Iron Hills

Owning Organization

Kinilan