I. The cut
Nobody builds a canal for the pleasure of walking beside it. The path is an afterthought, a strip of beaten earth left for the horse, and it is the only part of the whole undertaking that has outlived its purpose with any grace. I set out along one on a wet Tuesday with a flask, a borrowed map and no particular reason to arrive.
The first lock is a mile from the town. Its gates have not moved in thirty years and a birch has taken root in the upper sill. The towpath slips past all this without comment, as towpaths do, level as a table and exactly as wide as a horse.1
A towpath is level as a table and exactly as wide as a horse. Everything else about a canal can be argued with.
What the surveyors left
The line was set out in 1793 by men who walked it before there was anything to walk beside. Their field books survive, and they read like a list of small refusals:
- no gradient steeper than a barge can bear;
- no bend tighter than a seventy-foot hull;
- no bridge where a ford would do.
On the modern sheet the junction sits at grid reference SP 512 064, though the surveyors marked it only as the place where two fields met.2
A note on distances
Canal miles are honest miles. There is no climbing to do, no stile to cross and very little to decide, so the forty of them pass at exactly the speed of thought.
II. The summit pound
By the second afternoon the water had narrowed to a ditch and the path to a line in the grass. This is the highest and loneliest reach, fed by a reservoir nobody visits. I ate my bread on the coping of a lock and counted, in two hours, one cyclist and a heron that did not trouble to move.