I'VE had several comments about last Saturday's column about the Grand Contour Canal plan of 1942, including one from an angry chap who took it all too literally and said it was disgraceful that I was advocating the sale of North-East water to the south when really I should be demanding that water-intensive businesses should relocate from the south to the wet north.

He has a point, but I wasn't trying to get into a political debate about such things, merely just to air the fact that in the 1930s there was such an interesting plan.

Several people have asked if there's a more detailed plan of the canal, and indeed there is, as you can see.

For those who missed Saturday's column (just 80p, as of this weekend, from all good newsagents) it is below: ================================

IT'S raining again, lashing the windowpane. The puddles are forming, the rivers are rising.

It's recession again, dashing the recovery.

The gloom is gathering, the recriminations are rising. If only we could sell something that we had toomuch of to someone who desperately needs it. . .

Boris Johnson, the Conservatives' candidate in next week's mayoral elections in droughty London, has suggested that a pipeline or a canal be built so that the dry capital city can tap in to the water resources of the wet north.

It's a barkingly Boris idea - but it is not quite a watery pipedream.

In the 1930s, engineer John Pownall spotted what all the early canal and railway builders - James Brindley, George Rennie, George Stephenson - knew that at about 300ft above sea level there is a "natural canal line". It wiggles across the country, avoiding most obstacles.

In 1942, Pownall propounded the Grand Contour Canal. It was to be 100ft wide and 17ft deep. It would have flowed at about 310ft above sea level from a canal basin threemiles south of Newcastle centre to Leeds, through six miles of tunnels beneath the Pennines to Liverpool and Manchester and then south through Birmingham, Northampton and Hertford to London, with a branch spurring off to Bristol and Southampton.

Through North Yorkshire, the Grand Contour Canal would have followed the route of the A1 - east of Richmond - and through Durham, it would have run west of Darlington, Bishop Auckland and Durham. A branch canal was to run in the Aycliffe area above the north bank of the Tees to Hartlepool where there was to be a lift dropping oceangoing barges into the sea.

Pownall thought of his canal as a trade route with timetabled trains of barges sailing along it with "undisturbed regularity".

It was never dug because, in peacetime, money was allocated to setting up the NHS and then building new-fangled motorways.

Perhaps now its time has come - as a water transporter. Boris Johnson regards it as "magnificent" conception, and we in the North-East could profit by selling water from Kielder in the way we once sold coals from Newcastle.