Selby Canal, Tankard's Culvert

Selby Canal, Tankard's Culvert is a canal culvert designed by engineer William Jessop for the Aire and Calder Navigation Company.

The structure features limestone and gritstone headwalls, wing walls, waterway channel walls, and culverts, all built on timber foundations. It consists of a pair of inverted horse-shoe plan walled sumps lined by headwalls with open backs, situated on either side of a walled waterway channel. These sumps are connected by two culvert tunnels that run beneath the canal bed. The walls of the waterway channel have depressed angled U-plans, with straight sections that are splayed out at both ends.

Each sump headwall is topped with a course of gritstone blocks, which have recesses cut into them for timber railing posts secured by wrought-iron straps fixed in lead. Below these capstones, there are two courses of large ashlar limestone blocks. The inner face of the sump is battered with stepped stone courses, ending on either side of a recessed vertical central panel at the internal apex of the sump, which features two segmental stone arch culverts, each 1.75 meters high, at its base. The culvert tunnels extend beneath the canal channel to the opposite sump. The upper surfaces of the sumps are covered in grass, with the western surface serving as the towpath. The headwalls above the wing wall sections of the west sump rise one course higher before ending at the landward sides. The open rear ends of the sumps are blocked by silt and changes in ground levels, lacking drainage channels. The parallel masonry walls of the waterway channel create a 5.77-meter wide passage for the canal, with the ends of the channel walls splaying back and meeting dry-stone bank revetments, marking the junction with the adjacent canal banks.