Since the potteries around Stoke-on-Trent were in desperate need of something better than the pack-horse to carry their fragile wares, they wholeheartedly supported the connection of Staffordshire to the Trent and to the Mersey. The first sod was cut by Josiah Wedgwood in 1766 and Brindley carried it away in a barrow. From Runcorn, the canal would climb by a series of thirty-five locks, pass through a 3000-yard tunnel (the Harecastle Tunnel), then descend by a further forty locks to join the Trent at Wilden Ferry, near Shardlow. There was mounting ridicule about his scheme and in the event, although the canal opened from Shardlow to near Stafford in 1770, it took eleven years to drive the tunnel.