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.