 Some
work took me to the West Country recently and a chance to explore some of
the more isolated parts of our canal system in Devon and Cornwall.
 First visit was to the restored section of
the Grand Western Canal in Tiverton, maintained as a linear country park
by Devon County Council, and very well used, judging by my fleeting visit
on a hot summer day. There were masses of walkers and cyclists, although
boats are very rare on this isolated 11 mile navigable length. It deserves
the title Grand too, for the bit that survives was built in 1814 as a
branch of a grandiose scheme to link the Bristol and English channels by a
navigation that would remove the need for the dangerous passage round
Lands End, so the original thinking was big, seriously big barges or
perhaps small coasters. But the reality of escalating costs curtailed the
vision dramatically and the later part to be built was for narrow gauge
tub boats, and only ever linked through to the Bridgwater and Taunton
canal. It earned a living for some 30 years, but railway competition had
closed the narrow section by 1867 although the level barge section into
Tiverton kept going with limestone and lime burning until the1920s. But by
then the narrow bit with its boat lift and incline planes was totally
derelict and some of it is now difficult to find at all, never mind
consider restoring.
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No visit to the Grand Western could be
considered complete without a trip on the horse drawn trip boat ‘Tivertonian’,
operating now for 30 years and one of only 5 companies operating a horse
drawn boat regularly anywhere in the country at present. So I presented
myself at their base for a taste of their brand of nostalgia on one of the
hottest Sundays of the summer. This was a very mixed blessing. The weather
was wonderful, but the boat was therefore packed with its full complement
of 80 passengers. A profitable day for the company, thank goodness, but
difficult if you wanted to see out, or move about, or take photographs
over the side. Instead we sat quietly in our allotted places, avoiding eye
contact or conversation in our properly reserved English way, and spent
most of the hour trip outwards not quite looking at each other and not
quite seeing out either. I’ve always known from my own days as a trip boat
steerer that the passengers get a bit of a raw deal, paying to sit down
there in the bottom of a boat, seeing very little over the canalside
vegetation, made even worse nowadays by all the trees that have been
allowed to colonise both sides of the canal. Meanwhile the lucky captain
is steering the boat, experiencing the weather, admiring the scenery over
the hedges and chatting amicably to the locals. And he’s getting paid!
Unfair isn’t it? It was a well organised professional
operation, and the captain gave his introductory talk in a convincing and
amusing way even though we all knew he must have given something like the
same schpeil a hundred times at least this year, but it did its job, broke
the ice and put us at ease. ‘Prince’, an unflappable Shire horse was
hooked on and we quietly slipped along the two and a half miles to the
winding hole, and a stop to walk around and drink tea. The boat or barge,
for it is something of a hybrid, is custom built for the job, cheaply
built judging by the welding and clumsy lines, but carries a big payload
of passengers with all the necessities of toilets, bar and catering
facilities. Although barge width, it is in the style of a narrow boat with
all the colourful romantic necessities of roses and castles, and masses of
diamonds, but because of the height of the cabins for headroom inside, the
cabin proportions are rather non traditional, not to say lumpy. It sums up
the dilemmas facing the whole canal business, that awkward balance between
preserving the past and satisfying a modern business need, between simply
giving people a pleasant time or preaching and teaching about an important
bit of history. There are no easy solutions I fear. I chose to walk back,
dodging backwards and forwards to take photographs of the horse doing his
job. Prince sweated traditionally and looked great. |
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  Then to Bude in North Cornwall to look at
the tub boat canal which I knew was short - just a couple of miles today,
but was shocked with myself to discover the true depths of my ignorance - Bude was the entrance to 35 miles of canal network,
nearly as long as the
main line of the S.U. It is just a tiny little wriggle down left on most
canal maps if it’s there at all. In truth only the first 500 yards or so
are now properly navigable, from the entrance lock to the first bridge, a
swing bridge originally but now fixed at low level. This section is in use
as a small yacht harbour whilst the rest that is in water, rising through
two wiered locks, is a pleasant country walk. There are plans and hopes to
restore it to navigation but one wonders who would use it, and how often.
The lowest section would make an extensive marina but the remainder above
the two smallish locks would hardly be a tempting navigation challenge for
many. Room for another trip boat perhaps, but could it ever repay the
costs of re-instating locks and bridges? |
 The
present navigable bit is very pleasant however, and the little museum
alongside is worth a visit for some canal information. It is a bit amateur
and scrappy in a refreshingly old fashioned way, but friendly and cheap.
It occupies the site of the railway sidings that kept this part of the
canal harbour in business until the 1930s, although it was the same
railway that had really finished off the inland traffic. The rest of the
canal had been abandoned in 1891.
Inland then to Helebridge to try and find
the remains of the first incline plane at Marhamchurch. Although cut off
and disguised by recent roadworks on the main A39, now rather
pretentiously re-branded as the Atlantic Highway, the placid terminal
basin of the canal was easily found and I set off along the towpath to
explore. It was rather muddy and an old stone built wall alongside the
towpath seemed to be undergoing massive repairs. A few yards further along
there was a big tractor tyre across the path, followed by one of those
enormous modern straw bales that can only be lifted by a modern front lift
tractor. How did that get here then for there is no obvious vehicle access
to this narrow overgrown towpath? Curiouser and curiouser. And slowly it
dawned into my dull sightseeing mind that everything was muddy up to my
eyeline, that all the bushes and trees were filled with leaves and grass,
the tattered wrack and flotsam of a river bank after the spring floods.
But this is an artificial level canal, with houses and gardens and a wharf
alongside, and this flood level evidence was a least seven feet above the
normal canal level. Surely not? |
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 You heard about the floods at Boscastle,
saw the amazing pictures on television perhaps? It grabbed the headlines
but it wasn’t the only place that suffered. Here at Helebridge two quite
small rivers meet and flow down the valley to Bude harbour. The smaller
River Nest drains from the north and runs alongside the canal basin, and
although it was running high at the time it wasn’t the cause of the
problem. The other river drains from the south where a torrential
downpour - eight inches of rain in two hours - sent a wall of water down
to the new bridge under the new highway. It couldn’t cope and the water
smashed sideways across the fields to the canal settlement, destroying
fences, walls, two garages, and pushed a car into the canal. It flooded
the whole area back up to the bottom of the incline plane. It also flooded
the old barge building workshop that houses the remains of the last
remaining Bude canal tub boat and for the first time since it was rescued
from the mud in 1970 it was again awash with canal water. So were all the
other exhibits in this tiny museum, alas, and a little forlorn notice in
the car park reads ‘closed until further notice’. Very sad, for this is
alongside other planning application notices about the expansion plans for
this little museum, which will presumably have to be radically
reconsidered. If it happened once .... Miraculously, as at Boscastle,
there was no loss of life, although there had to be helicopter rescues
from rooftops, and amazingly it was all over in a few hours, leaving the
canal basin battered and the farmers’ straw bales in some very surprising
places. |
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Tony Lewery
The Brow, Ellesmere
September 2004 |
