Canalside Scenes

My original plan last Thursday was to go walking around Long Valley near Aldershot, but the military ranges were closed, so instead I picked out a set of interesting features to go and look at near Deepcut, around the Basingstoke Canal. In the event a series of locked gates on the land associated with the old Deepcut Barracks meant I couldn’t see those either; some people do, because I’ve seen references to cyclists visiting Porridgepot Hill and the Old Windmill watertower not far away. But I had to be content with a short circuit around the Canal.

The Basingstoke (Dr Bones will confirm) is one of the less-used waterways in the network: it’s not well-supplied with water and traffic is regularly stopped, and it doesn’t take much of that for boat-users to avoid it (in fact I remarked on this a few years ago). The houses lining one bank not far from Deepcut Bridge all seem equipped to take advantage of their location with kayaks or rowboats but apart from one short narrowboat which showed signs of not having moved for a long while I saw nothing bigger. But there were chaps fishing around Frimley Lock, carved owls, folly-like water-gates at Wharfenden Lake, and remarkable graffiti at Deepcut Bridge. They’ve been there for at least twelve years, but nobody seems to know the artist or who they’re depicting.

Pretty Pictures

Over late months I've acquired a couple of pictures which I have just now got around to putting on the walls of the Rectory. While I was at Petworth House at the start of the year, the National Trust shop had a little selection of art including some watercolours by a lady called Georgina Ling. One of these, to my great surprise, showed narrowboats on the canal at Swanvale Halt, caught in a snowy winter. Thanks to Dr Bones I do have a fascination for canals and so I had to buy that. 

Then, when I went with Sir Binarycode and Lady Arlen to Greenwich in the summer, we dropped in on a small antiques shop, and in a sheaf of prints I found a little one of Oystermouth Castle, which of course I visited last autumn, so I was tempted to get that. It came with a larger image of Harlech Castle, which I haven't visited, but both were worth the extra cash. The picture of Oystermouth Castle is fairly accurate though Harlech is not quite as dramatic as it appears here!

Bank Holiday Canal Ramble

A very simple photographic post today as I have no brain for anything else: I kept the Bank Holiday on Monday as a mixed observance of some work and some leisure, and went on a walk along the canal to St Catherine's Well and Chapel, a very, very familiar journey but one that always delights with its different views and moods. And it did! As I ate my lunch on the bench next to the a family came past looking at it and pointing out the little yellow flower in the water, which was gratifying as it was one I'd put there. It was still there, somehow stuck in the current, when I came down the hill from saying hello to the Chapel some time later.

Medium-Distance Social Distancing

Sometimes misty drizzle on an overcast day makes me think 'holy well weather' but it was rather more than that yesterday as I determined that my first proper walk under the Current Restrictions would take me along the canal towpath to St Catherine's Chapel, even if the journey did take in a holy well, the one at the foot of Chapel Hill. Once I got there it was fine and sunny, but thunder and lightning accompanied my egress from Swanvale Halt, and heralded my return some time later. The weather did mean social distancing wasn't much of an issue: I've never crossed the park without meeting a single human soul before. Narrowboats look cosy in the rain though that depends on your heating system. Have I really never noticed the pillbox before, or is my memory failing me?

Reflections in Water and Glass

My sister-in-the-Spirit Cylene has recently moved to a particularly benighted part of South Wales ('used to be junkiesville', she says cheerily in her Stateside manner) but her partner is having some expensive medical treatment, paid for by her parents, done in London so they were around yesterday. I took Cylene to Little Venice where we nursed coffee in a canalboat café for quite some time and I watched moorhens trying to nibble algae off bits of floating plastic bag. Despite all the pressures inherent in her new circumstances, geographic and emotional, Cylene seems to have acquired a fundamental sense of rest which she's never had before and I am pleased about that. It would have been hard to be too discontented on such a beautiful day.

Just around the corner is Tournament House: I can't imagine how it can have evaded my notice before now. Built between 1932 and 1935, it has that monolithic corporatist Art Deco swagger that could not have envisaged a building being used for anything but the purpose for which it was erected. The blue sky reflected in its windows adds a sumptuousness. 

Dereliction of Sundry Kinds

After my episode of  'overwalking' on holiday, I finally did what I've been saying for years I should be doing and bought a pair of proper walking boots, which had their first outing yesterday. My friend Cylene often posts images of derelict or abandoned buildings on LiberFaciorum and one of these, not that far away from me, was the focus of my trip. In Nearer Sussex lies the hamlet of Bedham, and Bedham contains a surprise.

Bedham's surprise is a ruined church, sequestered in a steep-sided dell in the woods, surrounded by houses but invisible from them all. It was built in 1880 as a joint church and schoolroom. For several generations, the children of the charcoal-burners of this undeveloped woodland district came here to learn their ABC, and then on Sundays the Rector of Fittleworth held a service in the building. Education ceased in 1925 but the church, dedicated to St Michael & All Angels, kept going until being declared redundant in 1959. 

Keep Out! warn the signs, but provided you don't go clambering round the walls you will come to no harm. It's a haunting ruin, strangely beached in its hollow like a ship, but it doesn't take much to imagine pinafored Victorian children running down the slope on their way to lessons.

The line of the Wey & Arun Canal runs through this area. I hadn't realised until I set out that my route would take me across its course at a couple of places. This piece of industrial archaeology, as haunting in its way as Bedham Church, is Pallingham Quay Bridge, right at the southern end of the Canal. Not far beyond it, the navigable part of the River Arun began:

I wanted to see the Toat Monument, and so I did, although I discovered you can't approach that closely. Built in the 1820s as a memorial to a man who died falling off his horse, it seems almost a bit insensitive that the reason you can't approach the monument today is that the space is occupied by horse paddocks.

By the time I got back to the car it was so dark I could barely spot the sign indicating the little car-parking area among the trees. 

Odiham

A bit of a filler, today. A couple of weeks ago on my day off I went to Odiham, undeterred by the rain. Odiham is a large village with what Pevsner would call 'a main street of a distinctly urban character' a few miles to the west of Farnham. It has a castle which I went to see, albeit what seems like a surprisingly small one for Henry III's sister, resident there in the mid-1200s. It is very, very ruined indeed, with only the bare indications of windows and features, but the authorities keep it tidy and have installed a sort of steel and glass canopy in the entrance which looks rather handsome (though is hard to photograph convincingly, so I haven't).

And then there's the Basingstoke Canal, which skirts Odiham and provides a pleasant walk to the north of the village, and parallel with it. Notoriously the Basingstoke is often low in water and boats are restricted in how far and fast they're allowed to move along it, and although this stretch of the canal is navigable, several parts are very narrow and it doesn't look as though much traffic has been along it in months. 

In the churchyard at Odiham is a Pest House, a tiny one-room cottage where you were put if you were suspected of suffering from some appalling lurgy to see whether you died or not: I'd heard of these before but not seen one in the brick, as it were. And, on my walk, amid the tedious Union Jacks and St George's Crosses flying in the gardens of various tidy houses, I saw a bold-striped flag of blue, black and white, which turned out to be the national ensign of Estonia. One lives and learns. 

And Great Was Its Fall

This chunk of graffiti-spattered concrete may not look particularly fascinating, which is partly why I photographed it between Dante and the glug-glug jug in the dining room. It represents part of my past, and many other people's. 

On Bank Holiday Monday I and Ms Formerly Aldgate went to Enslow to visit Dr Bones. We helped her (I think we helped) move the boat rather pointlessly down to the turning circle at Shipton and then back again, just to give us a trip, offered an apple pie which it turned out she couldn't eat having given up gluten, and she repaid us by taking us scrambling up a muddy bank to view the remains of the Cement Works. The works had sat beside the canal since the 1920s and closed in the 1980s; and its soaring chimney dominated the landscape around for much of that time. When I and Dr Bones spent a lot of our time traversing the waterway between Oxford and Lower Heyford in 2003-5, that chimney was a constant feature of almost whatever journey we made. Over the last 18 months the site has again been used for quarrying and Dr Bones reports that boaters moored just south of Enslow Lock have got used to finding their boats powdered in white dust. The old cement works buildings, however, were of no use to the quarrying company, and the programme of demolitions finally reached the chimney on the Saturday before the Bank Holiday. Dr Bones and Alex recorded the moment for posterity.

When we arrived at the top of the bank, the chimney lay across the undulating landscape of the quarry, I thought, rather like the bones of some gigantic beast. My tiny fragment of chimney will be a relic of those days spent churning up the waters of the Oxford Canal.