Day 15: The Grand Western Canal

Distance: 13.8 miles
Walking-speed: 3.0 mph (not counting breaks)
Today, we crossed the border out of Devon and into our third county: Somerset. If there is one thing we have learned about Cornwall and Devon, it's that they are hilly. Really hilly. Ridiculous steep hills, one after another, down and into deep valleys and then way up. Makes for great scenery, but carrying all our stuff a million feet up every day was getting old.
So today was a nice change. Only two hills, at either end of the day: down 400 feet from Hornhill this morning, and up 150 feet to Greenham Hall at the end of today's walking. The rest was dead flat. That's because we were walking the towpath of the Grand Western Canal, and the stretch we were on has no locks. No locks, no elevation changes. Awesome! Even better, pretty much the whole eleven plus mile stretch had a nice 3 foot wide gravel path, which made for very nice walking.




The idea when they started planning the canal, in the late 1700s, was to link the English Channel north to the Bristol channel, so that stuff, mostly coal, could be shipped without making the slow and dangerous journey around Land's End. The vision never came to pass, because money was short, and by the time the canal was half done, in the mid 1800s, railways had moved in as a cheaper and faster alternative. So only 24 miles of canal was ever built. Half still survives. Back in the 1970s, they were going to fill it in and completely wipe it out. Happily, people objected, and instead they dredged it, made it a park, and revamped the towpath into a nice walking and cycling path. Canals to trails!




We saw a few people fishing, and saw a hundred feet ahead the splash of someone releasing what looked like a big fish! I don't fish myself, but my Dad is the best fisherman in the world, so I've picked up some of the lingo, and we talked with them for a spell. They were pike fishing, using chopped up big pieces of mackerel for bait. The fish we'd seem them release was ten pounds. Last week, they'd caught a 15 pounder. While we were talking, the guy who caught the fish was wrapping his hand, which was bleeding quite profusely. Looks like the pike had exacted some revenge as he was being released. Nice to see, usually fishing is so one sided. I don't have a picture, since the action was a little too far ahead, and I was a little too slow with the camera, so here's a swan picture instead.




The engineering work required to build a dead flat canal through the Devon countryside is pretty amazing. My favorite was when we'd cross bridges over streams. So the canal would be not just higher than the surrounding countryside, but actually higher than the stream flowing below. In an ironic twist, the canal engineers replaced a section of canal with a large aqueduct to carry the water over the railroad that eventually did the canal in. Check it out, Dawn is standing next to water of the canal in this picture, with the ground way way down there.




After a nice leisurely walk, we hit the end of the line. At Lowdwells, where finally the engineers had to build a lock, the canal today simply ends, abandoned in 1869, after only 31 years of operation. We picked up a footpath for the last mile or so to our B&B. We're staying at another revamped Victorian country house, Greenham Hall. Here's our first view of it, high up on a hill overlooking sheep fields and the River Tone.




Tomorrow we pick our way across footpaths and lanes that roughly follow the course of the abandoned portion of the Grand Western Canal.




We'll be leaving Greenham Hall early, because we have reservations at The Castle at Taunton - a fancy hotel in a castle. How cool is that? I'm pretty excited about it!

Location:Greenham Hall, Somerset