I am delighted to announce that the Cotswold Canals Trust will be joining us for the first time Pre-War Prescott this year on Saturday 13th June.
The Trust is the umbrella organization for restoring and maintaining the Cotswold canals. This project is currently one of the largest heritage restorations of its kind anywhere in the U.K. as the Trust works to restore both the Stroudwater Navigation and the Thames and Severn Canal that meet at the Sapperton tunnel near Cirencester. At 3,718 yards (that’s well over two miles), the tunnel enables the canal to cut through the Cotswold escarpment and was the longest on the canal network at the time of cutting. Combined, the two canals connect the River Thames at Inglesham, near at Lechlade with the River Severn at Saul, near Sharpness.
The objective of the Trust is to re-open the entire navigation, including the Sapperton tunnel, which will be an enormous undertaking. The total length to be restored is 36 miles and includes 44 locks. Once open, the two canals will represent a major enhancement to the British canal network.
The Trust will be bringing their new Roadshow display to Prescott and we look forward to meeting the Trust’s team and learning more about this enormously challenging but hugely worthy project.
Those who took part in our Sunday run in 2018 will remember our lunch stop at the Tunnel House Inn situated spectacularly at the southern portal of the Sapperton tunnel. The Inn was originally built to house the navvies who dug the tunnel and those who legged the boats through the tunnel.
The canal was one of the favourites of L. T. C. Rolt, who wrote in his richly descriptive style in Narrow Boat in 1944:
‘There is something indescribably forlorn about these abandoned waterways; like old ruined houses or silent mills, they are haunted by the bygone life and toil which has left its deathless, eloquent mark upon them. Just as in old houses the worn steps are the memorial of many vanished feet, so on the canals it is the grooves worn by the towing-lines in the rotting lockbeams or the crumbling brickwork of bridges that bring the past to life.
Most beautiful and most tragic of all is the old Thames and Severn Canal, climbing up the Golden Valley between great hills that wear their beechwoods like a mane. At the summit at Sapperton it pierces the spine of the Cotswold scarp by a tunnel two and a quarter miles in length, and thereafter winds cross the open wolds to join the young Thames at Inlgesham above Lechlade. At Daneway, a tiny village clinging to the steep slope by the western portal of the tunnel, there is an old inn of Cotswold stone where they still remember the boats. The wide windows under their carved drip-stones have seen them moored in what is now a grassy hollow, and they have watched the smoke of cabin fires soar upwards on still evenings against the dark background of the hanging beechwoods. The ‘Flower of Gloster’ was one of the last boats to travel from the Severn to the Thames by this route, and I shall never cease to envy Mr. Temple Thurston his good fortune. Perhaps it is because I have a particular regard for the Cotswold country that I regret most the passing of this, the only Cotswold canal.’
Ian
You can enter Pre-War Prescott 2020 here.