Big locks and curious sights

We’re now on to the Kennet & Avon Canal (K & A). It’s 87 miles long, stretching from Reading to the Floating Harbour at Bristol. They started building it in 1718, but it took just over 90 years to complete. By the 1960s, parts of the canal had fallen into disrepair and were closed. It was fully reopened in 1990 following restoration by the volunteers of the Kennet and Avon Canal Trust.

We are very familiar with it as our boat was originally based in Newbury. It’s a challenging waterway to navigate, not because it’s hard to find your way, but because of the nature of the canal. It’s wide and a mix of river and canal. The locks are big, about 14ft wide and the beams on the gates are heavy to operate. The 105 locks are easier to manage if you have a wide-beam boat or two narrowboats paired up together. Wide-beam boats are between 10-12ft ( 3-3.6m) wide whereas narrowboats are usually no more than 6ft 10inches (2.05m). The locks are long enough to accomodate a 72ft (22m) boat, so you can imagine that you could fit a small bungalow into some of them and they take a lot of water to fill them.

Mooring is often a challenge due to shallow margins and the need to get ropes secured on mooring pins and gangplanks placed to give access to the towpath. For these reasons, people find this canal too difficult to manage and it’s common to hear that a boater has turned around and given up. We love the natural margins of the banks and the diversity of the flora and fauna. Ian is making good use of the scythe that he got from Santa to clear the nettles and brambles on the banks when we need to put out the gangplank.

As the railway from Bristol to London parallels the canal, there are a lot of permanent residential moorings and liveaboards along the K & A. Liveaboards are people who permanently live on their boat but continue to move around the waterways. There are more wide-beam boats then we’ve seen before, and some very unusual boats too, like old offshore lifeboats which were previously used on oil rigs. They sell for between £3,500 and £8,500. Just as a comparison, a used narrowboat in good condition could be anything from £35,000 to £120,000+ dependant on length and age, whereas wide-beams would start at around £100,000+.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People do the strangest displays on their boats too, just in the last week we’ve seen two contrasting manikins, a Lara Croft and a Golden Lady and some rather bizarre sculptures made from canoes and various bits and pieces. I’ve seen smaller pieces too like a small stone face in a tree hollow and a post-box positioned in the wall of a railway embankment on the wrong side of a river section! Raising the never-ending debate of what is art!

For a few days we were moored close to the Claverton Pumping station. It’s nestled in the valley close to the River Avon and was built to pump water up the hillside to the K & A. There is a very pretty weir nearby that creates a reservoir for it and this has become a very popular spot for wild swimming. It is rather cold first thing in the morning, but a treat to have it all to yourself.

We’ve now reached Bath, restocked the larder and collected Amazon parcels from a local shop. So, in preparation for the hot weather to come, we are heading on into the countryside again.