It was decided to arrange the locks in clusters to reduce the cost of the project, and so Banavie was chosen as the site for eight locks. On the Forth and Clyde Canal, low level crossings were carried over the canal by bascule bridges, but Telford and Jessop rejected this arrangement for their canal, as they thought the risk of masts being damaged by them was too great. Consequently, cast iron swing bridges were used, and both the road and the railway at the foot of the flight cross bridges of this type. To provide rubble-stone to build the locks, a quarry was opened at Corpach Moss. By June 1809, three of the locks had been completed, and although completion of the flight was expected in 1810, there was a shortage of labour, and only three more were finished. The final two were ready by the end of 1811. As built, the staircase locks were long, rather than the of the single locks. Construction of the rest of the canal dragged on, and it was not finally opened until October 1822. Traffic through the locks developed steadily, and in 1824 an inn was created for passengers on the steamboats, by converting one of the lock houses on the flight. Three steamboats regularly ran between Glasgow and Inverness, taking six days to complete the round trip. There were some teething problems, and the canal was closed for two weeks in April 1829 while problems with the Banavie locks were rectified. James Loch, who produced a report on the canal in 1835, declared that the inn at Banavie was too small, and too far from Corpach, despite having praised it the previous year. George May produced another report in 1837, in which the Banavie locks were heavily criticised. He described the masonry as "execrable", and argued that the contractor who had built them had not expected them ever to be used, but had somehow managed to hide the poor workmanship from Telford. A suggestion that the canal should be abandoned was, however, circumvented. Repairs to the locks were required in 1880 and in 1910: there were serious defects in the masonry. By the end of the First World War, the canal was in serious financial difficulties, with maintenance costs far exceeding revenue, and 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 broke through two of the Banavie lock gates, causing flooding.