Dawdling in Devizes

Wadworth's impressive brewery dominates the town

We are passing a few days here waiting for our travelling pal, Mac, to catch up. And what a pleasant little, old fashioned country town it is too. It has its own brewery (Wadworth's), independent cinema, market and, of course, canal. What more can you ask for in a small town?
Today, like many similar towns, it looks a little frayed round the shirt cuffs but clearly it wasn't always this way to judge by the many handsome and ornate sandstone buildings that dot the streetscapes around the place. Apparently the place has no less than 500 listed buildings!

Handsome buildings can be seen in every street

The town's wealth and status originated in the wool and cloth trades, then it grew to become the largest corn market in the south west and, thanks to the canal, a centre of transport.
These days it seems quieter and a little sleepy – the Beeching axe that closed its railway line didn't help, though it has kept the 'commuter-isation' of the place at bay and so it retains more individuality and charm than many.

The indoor market

Today the town was bustling; it was market day – and a chance to be reminded what proper vegetables look like (e.g. in all shapes and sizes). We picked up a massive cauliflower, a couple of punnets of strawberries, many of which would have been rejected by Tesco for not being designer-strawb styling, and some excellent cheese.
There's an indoor market too of smaller stalls and a little tea-bar largely occupied by old dears in wheelchairs.
It reminded me of visits to Bury St Edmunds market before the old covered market was knocked down and replaced by a shopping mall as part of the town's gentrification.

Town wharf and K&A Trust centre

We are moored opposite Devizes Wharf, home of the energetic Wharf Theatre and the Kennet&Avon Trust canal museum and cafe. And what a fascinating little museum it is too, telling the full history of the waterway and detailing the massive efforts, largely by volunteers, that were needed to bring it back to life. I had no idea just how derelict it had become - all bar a dozen or so of its hundred locks had fallen into disrepair, the famous pumping engine houses were in ruin, wharves like the one at Devizes were crumbling into decay and even the famous Caen Hill flight was in a perilous state.
We took a walk down the famous 29 locks to psych ourselves up for the trip down them at the weekend. I'm not sure that wasn't a mistake....

Time for a walk

Is this what they mean by a doggy bag?

Back at Hungerford our travelling partner Mac dipped out for a few days of visiting family and friends so to let him catch back up we slowed our pace too.
The original plan was for us to find somewhere to leave the boat then do some visiting as well but finding a suitable place to leave Harry on this summit stretch of the K&A has been harder than finding a nine pound note.
The whole canal has been shallow but this stretch is shallowest of the lot. We found a slot at the friendly Pewsey Wharf Boat Club but frustratingly couldn't get the stern closer than the centre of the channel. And to tie up on pins at the bankside, like the many 'locals' to be found hereabouts do, was nigh on impossible too for a deep drafted boat like ours, certainly not for a few days away.
So we abandoned the visiting and have been dawdling through those moorings we could make and taking a closer look at some of the fine scenery in the rolling Wiltshire downs.

One man and his dog

The last couple of days we've been moored outside the little village of All Cannings (fine village pub and excellent little volunteer manned community shop). A couple of hours walking took us to the top of the local high spot, Cliffords Hill, and back so yesterday we adventured a bit further, a couple of miles down the towpath and then a climb up the next ridge of hills.

The beautiful rolling chalk downs of Wiltshire

Only snag is that while Nicholson's marks canalside footpaths, once you're half a mile off the towpath you're off piste so it wasn't long before we were somewhat lost and struggling round a recently ploughed cornfield in the vague hope that we were heading towards a proper path again.
Bristly rough ploughed stubble is bad enough for humans to walk on; for Seadog Brian whose nether regions are rather close to the ground it became a cause for mutiny. He stopped. We stopped – and decided that maybe he was just small enough to fit in the rucksack. He agreed and once we had reached smoother going would have been quite content to stay there.
 Finally, four hours and six or seven miles after we started we finally found our way back to Harry. It was a great walk (well, for two of us); fabulous scenery, far reaching views, sunshine and a fresh, cooling breeze. Reminds you what a glorious country Britain is.

201 not out

Water only flows one way – downhill – so maintaining a water supply for the summit level has been a problem for every canal designer. Tap a nearby river or build a reservoir were the usual solutions but neither would have worked on the K&A so instead the ingenious engineers enlarged a small lake further down and built Crofton Pumping Station with two huge steam powered beam engines to pump water from there back up to the summit.

Two hundred and one years later they still do the job (albeit only occasionally now as electric pumps perform the day to day job). That makes them the oldest working steam pumping engines in the world. The newer of the pair was built by Harvey's of Hayle in 1845 but older, built by Boulton & Watt, dates from 1812. And to put that in perspective, that was the year Napoleon was retreating from Moscow.

They're impressive beasts to see, even if it wasn't a steaming day. but more than the sheer size what thrilled me was the sheer elegance and quality of the engineering. I fancy a Formula One engineer would look at it and be impressed.
PS After grumbling about the state of some K&A locks it was good to see some serious improvement works going on at various locks today.

Rough round the edges

My reading glasses fell in the cut the other day and with them went my rose tinted spectacles. After three days on the Kennet & Avon my eyes have been opened to some of its shortcomings.
It's still a very beautiful, largely rural canal but it has its problems too. Some of the locks are desperately in need of attention: most leak but we've come upon several that leak more out the bottom gates then is going in the top ones necessitating a two-man (or one man and his boat) shove to get one to open. We got stuck on a sill going into one, too.

Mooring is probably the biggest issue for a deep drafted boat like ours. Unless you luck into one of the pretty infrequent visitor moorings you're limited to those bits of bankside that aren't reed-filled, which many are, and when you find one you'll be lucky to get a deep boat within a plank's width of the side. It's frustrating and probably one reason why some of the visitor moorings appear clogged with, shall we say, infrequent movers. 
We've been breasting up alongside our shallower drafted travelling companion and Seadog Brian has become pretty adept at leaping between boats and then walking the plank to do his necessaries. There can't be many boaters who need to wear a lifejacket to go to the toilet!

We spent a day in Newbury, which the canal winds pleasantly through the centre of. It's probably the best aspect of a small town which looks rather forlorn with a dowdy shopping mall (the Kennet Centre) and too many empty shops. Out of town, under the controversial by-pass was what we christened 'The By-pass Boatyard' – a "continuous cruiser" with so much stuff gathered along the towpath, a generator working away powering his angle grinder on his boat that it would be hard to conceive him moving anywhere in a hurry.

The horse drawn trip boat with its human caargo

The canal remains a delight, though, with lovely mill streams and weirs everywhere, handsome houses and, outside the pretty village of Kintbury, even a horse drawn trip boat.
Hungerford, where we are now, is a small and clearly extremely affluent little place. Put it this way, I saw two E Type Jaguars out for a sunny drive as well as the usual motoring affluence of big Audis and sporty BMWs.
We've just met up with the couple who had Harry built for them and filled in some of its early history. They loved the boat, having seen it lying sad and neglected on the K&A in the years after they sold it.

Westward ho!

The tree-lined charms of the K&A

 We had been viewing a trip down the Kennet & Avon with some suspicion after hearing tales of shallow sections, difficult locks, lines of permanent moorers and so on. But so far it's been an absolute delight: sleepy, rural, tree lined and surprisingly free of boats, moored or moving. And especially free of those big plastics from the Thames.
First sight of the K&A however did ring a few alarm bells. Its junction with the Thames in Reading is marked by the all too familiar and sorry canal hallmarks of graffiti daubed signs, litter and hippy boaters – one of whom 'entertained' those of us moored by the riverside Tesco with 3 a.m. drunken boating about, shouting, shrieking and falling in. Other parts of riverside Reading have their appeal but this is an especially charmless spot and worth avoiding except for shop-stops.

Boating through the Oracle

Once on the K&A, though, things soon improve. It starts with a run right through the centre of the town's Oracle shopping mall on a twiddly, one-way traffic light controlled section where, a bit like zoo visitors, the shoppers can envy, admire or perhaps laugh at these waterborne creatures from an alien world. It's quite the best amalgam of old canal and modern city centre that I've seen.

Sorry, Mrs B I'm afraid mooring is not allowed - even there

After that the canal soon throws off urban Reading and passes into its own leafy world, close to but invisible from the shops, offices and houses. The K&A is a mix of river and canal and this stretch is largely winding, tree lined river. It's delightful.
The locks though are, in a word, bizarre. Designed by the Edgar Allen Poe of the lock business: all strange lengths, odd widths and depths, with a motley assortment of paddle gear scrounged from the leftovers sheds of other canal companies.

The Garston turf lock empty

And full. Well, it's certainly different!

None is stranger than the 'turf lock' at Garston which looks like it's been hit by a bomb despite, or maybe because of, the wartime pill boxes either side. The lock walls are not there, just a curious framework of steel girders, and the sides slope away at an angle in a mix of mud and the sort of sturdy weeds that can withstand regular flooding as the lock fills. Apparently it and many others since replaced were originally timber sided with sloped turf banks either side. They leaked like sieves but that didn't matter as this waterway is the River Kennet kept the system well topped up.

And Sheffield Lock with its wibbly wobbly walls

After  Garston is another oddity: Sheffield Lock with its 'crinkly-crankly' walls and a couple of extra feet in width thrown in so even two boats bang about as it fills.
What surprises will today's locks bring?

Spot the Brian

Just in case, Brian is the one in the red collar (I think)

Brian; meet Charlie. Charlie; meet Brian!
We always thought our Brian was a one-off, not simply because of his, er, singular personality traits but also because of his looks – a sort of long legged dachshund (sorry, Brian) or Jack Russell with more than a hint of German sausage dog to him.
But then, on the riverside towpath at Reading, we met Charlie, or Charleston to give him his full moniker and Brian met his doppelganger.
Like Brian, Charlie is a rescue dog – his owner actually found him wandering at the roadside after he'd been chucked out of a car.
He's four so a little less grey round the gills than 12 year old Brian. But they frisked happily around each other with the usual displays of canine affection, bottom sniffing and mutual pissing, until it was time to exchange final pees and say cheerio.

Ouch!

Nice waterway, shame about the lock landings. That's our verdict after today's little contretemps. We came in to moor up at the Chertsey lock landing and, too late, I spotted that the overhanging edge was coming straight at our cabin side. Bang! we clumped it and left two nasty scrapes down the pristine paintwork.
And when we moored up for the night I noticed a matching pair of scrapes on the other side which we must have banged on an earlier lock.
I'm not entirely sure why the lock landing edges have to overhang at all - and so much: the one at Chertsey would have still bashed us even if we had substantial fenders down. Maybe we need to do what the plastics do and run with huge balloons in knitted socks dangling everywhere. Or the hippy boat trick of hanging old tyres off the sides.
Ah well, just have to get out the touch up paint.