From our knees up, it’s almost impossible to tell where our legs end and our sneakers begin. A thick crust of seeping river mud sticks to our shins and chokes our shoes. Our skin bubbles and tingles from the spiteful attention of hundreds of nettles enjoying their last hurrah as winter approaches. But if you were to look from the battlefield with those middle-aged legs to the sweaty faces above, you’d find something you might not have expected: laughter, excitement and a crazed look around the eyes.
My friend Alan and I are a few hours into a self-sufficient, three-day adventure walking the length of the historic Kennet & Avon Canal, the southernmost (and possibly most beautiful) wide waterway that crosses the width of England, allowing narrowboats to to travel from coast to coast, from Bristol to London. It was a route intended to revolutionize 18th century trade. Rather than having to deal with the rocky dangers and treacherous seas of the south coast and the Channel, not to mention pirates and the unwanted attention of the French Navy, merchants could simply float along the channel and arrive safely at their destination arrive.
The canal was a monumental feat of civil engineering. The first 20 mile section, from Newbury to Reading, became navigable in 1723, just over 300 years ago, while the final section was completed 90 years later in 1810. The ambitious engineer who oversaw much of the project was the masterful John Rennie. – he was to the canals what Isambard Kingdom Brunel was to the railways. The whole undertaking cost £1 million – a huge sum at the time, although Rennie himself received only a modest £360 for his efforts. By the time the canal was completed, running all the way from Bristol’s Floating Harbor to the easternmost lock of Reading’s River Kennet, where it flows into the Thames, the waterway was 96 miles long and consisted of 107 locks (now 105), 236 bridges, two steam-powered pumping stations, a mile-long tunnel and thank goodness how many pubs.
Despite its hugely impressive length, the Kennet & Avon was never prosperous and fell into disuse – largely due to the opening of the Great Western Railway, which followed a parallel route so that goods that could have been loaded onto barges ended up on carriages. , and the canal began its long and inevitable decline, until the last vessel finally passed through in 1952.
But not all was lost. In the second half of the 20th century, an army of volunteers and enthusiasts began renovating it and it was reopened by Queen Elizabeth in August 1990. It is a beautiful irony that the canal, built in the name of trade, commerce and entrepreneurship, is now a spectacular nature reserve. It’s home to many species of birds and countless animals and fish, and it’s a place of peace and relaxation for walkers, kayakers, cyclists – and of course a few runners, like Alan and me.
The big advantage of jogging along the canal is that it is flat; hills are anathema to middle-aged plodders. It’s also quite difficult to get lost, there are feeding stations (pubs) at regular intervals and if you start in the west you might be lucky and have the afternoon sun and prevailing wind at your back, gently pushing you along.
That was the plan anyway. What we hadn’t taken into account was that in November the sun doesn’t stick around for long, that pubs are usually closed out of season, that darkness falls faster in the afternoon than a dropped pint of Guinness and, oh yeah, there was a lot of mud…
We started early on a Saturday morning in Bristol, after a hearty breakfast overlooking the city’s fascinating floating harbour. The sky was blue, but weeks of heavy rain often left us wading up to our knees in muddy water in many places along the towpath. It was slow. After a morning of sliding and sliding, we approached Bath, where the river water was so high that it lapped against the foundations of many of the city’s elegant stone bridges. Covered in mud, we meandered to a pretty Georgian square for lunch; tourists stared at us as if we were prehistoric men dug out of an ancient swamp. We loaded up on pasta and lemonade before returning to the towpath and heading east out of the Roman city.
After a few more muddy miles we stopped at one of the jewels of this great canal, the extravagantly decorative Dundas Aqueduct – a curving, three-arched structure designed by John Rennie and completed in 1805, which carried the canal high over the undulating River Avon flows. below.
On and on we plodded through Bradford-upon-Avon, with its medieval barns and bridges, and finally arrived in pitch darkness at that temple of modern convenience: Melksham’s Travelodge. We looked like extras from AIt is quiet on the Western Front when we entered our room. I showered, but Alan decided a bath was the only solution to the mess. When he got out of the tub, it looked like a swamp – so much mud was left behind that it was clogging the drain hole. We confessed everything to the cheerful receptionist, who just laughed and said, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ve seen a lot worse than that!”
The next morning, with stiff legs and pain, we continued down the bridges and locks towards the undisputed highlight of the canal: Caen Hill. Pronounced ‘reed’, it is the steepest lock in the world – 29 locks in total with a height difference of 150 metres. It was the last part of the navigation to be completed. If you’re lucky and the lock gates face favorably in your direction, it will take between three and five hours to climb the flight on a narrowboat; you are literally sailing uphill.
The speed limit for boats on the canal is 5 km per hour and sometimes I don’t think we ran much faster than that. But as we left our busy family lives behind, our racing minds slowed to adjust to the steady cadence of our feet and it felt like just the right pace. Our random thoughts and cheerful, meaningless chatter unfolded with each step as the lazy ribbon of the canal unfurled before us. Keep moving and you will eventually discover a beautiful inner silence.
We spent the second night in Devizes, filling ourselves with food and fuel – onion rings and lasagna, four pints, why not? Two very muddy runners in the dining room of the much-loved Bear pub didn’t faze the locals at all.
The third day, and the last 30 miles of the canal towpath, was tough. Our feet were swollen and blistered from the constant muddy wetness – several toenails were hanging by a thread. The names of the passing narrowboats seemed to sum up our situation: in the morning we saw one called “Isn’t This Pleasant” and that evening we saw another called “Absence of Reason”.
Finally we reached the post-industrial hinterland of Reading. As we stumbled towards the end, where the Kennet joins the Thames and boats can travel downstream to London, we found our route suddenly blocked. The final 200 meter section of the towpath was closed due to work on a retaining wall. We couldn’t believe it! All this and we will not reach the finish line. We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. We’ve done a little bit of both. In many ways it was perfect; After all, no one wants a great adventure to end.
For more information about visiting the Kennet & Avon Canal, visit Canalrivertrust.org.uk