Rants from the Hollow

Every time a boat transits a lock, a huge volume of water runs downstream.  Canal engineers struggle not only to ensure adequate water to supply the locks, but they also need to compensate for leakage, which turned out to be especially critical in the stretch of canal between Bradford and Batch.  Chief Engineer John Rennie came up with the solution of putting a pumping station at Crofton.

Unlike the steam powered pumping station at the canal’s peak in Claverton, this pump would be powered by the current of the Avon River. Volunteers have completely restored this facility, putting it back into working order.  Just a few miles out of bath, this was the first stop on my weekend cycle tour of the Kennet & Avon.

Claverton’s waterwheel is a type of breast wheel in which the water flows into the side of the wheel, and continues underneath it. Less efficient than a pure overshot wheel, it makes better use of available water power than does an undershot wheel. With its iron frame and wooden paddles, this wheel is 24 feet wide and 17 feet long.

The Pit Wheel on the left (below), a wheel composed of cast iron sections with wooden teeth, is directly connected to the axle of the water wheel.

It drives an iron-toothed gear wheel on the right which is mounted on the same axle as the flywheel and connecting rod.

The connecting rod oscillates a pair of large beams which are connected to a pair of pumps.

In order to keep the pump cylinder rods straight, a clever mechanism called a Watt’s Linkage is used.  This same mechanism was a common feature of 19th century pumping stations, and can also be seen at Crofton and Crossness (photo gallery appearing here soon).  One of the pump cylinder heads is shown below, in a picture taken from below the beam.

More photos of Claverton can be seen in my gallery.

I took my time over breakfast and the Sunday paper with Peter & Carolyn at the Upper Westcourt B&B, leaving about 10am for the 15 minute ride, arriving at The Crofton Pumping Station well before it opened (blog posts on both pumping stations coming up shortly).  Unlike the day before, it was still sunny after this day’s  industrial heritage stop.

The first half of today’s trip would still follow country roads, before rejoining the tow path, but looking at the map, they didn’t diverge as far from the canal, and at least seemed to be less steep.  It turned out that I had multiple opportunities to practice coasting, preceeded of course by the obligatory climb.

Like Saturday, the first half of the trip was characterised by attractive country towns, like Great Bedwyn, and pretty villages, like Little Bedwyn.

The biggest town of the day was Hungerford, which under other circumstances would have been worth a longer stay. On the far side of Hungerford, the road crossed a cattle guard and a gate, and I entered the Hungerford Common Portdown.

The commons is a 200 acre shared pasture.  I stopped to take some pictures, and watched a farmer walk out to check on his cows, all of whom seemed to have a healthy suspicion of  the road (in spite of the nominal 30mph speed limit).

Kintbury was the last town before rejoining the towpath.  Many of the buildings were built directly on the narrow High Street.  I stopped to take a picture of my bike in front of a colorfully named pub, and then continued on, finally rejoining the canal and towpath at Hamstead Lock. The path was much narrower and yellower than it had been at the start of the trip in Bath.  In many places, it wasn’t wide enough for 2 bikes to pass between the nettles and the canal.

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Last Saturday, my loaded touring bike and I caught an 0813 train to Reading, from whence we continued on a fast 1 hour trip to Bath in Wiltshire. I waited outside the station for my GPS to get a signal, and then I took off into the Saturday morning traffic in this busy tourist town. My goal was to complete the entire Kennet & Avon Canal Cycle Route, which ended 85 miles later, on the other side of a ridge, in Reading, Berkshire. The route crossed the 1773 Pulteney Bridge, which is lined with shops. After about 10 minutes of cycling, and only one wrong turn, I crossed a short bridge, and turned onto the canal tow path. From here to Devises I’d be following a fairly wide and level path, for the most part smooth and well-graded.

It was a beautiful, sunny morning, and I stopped to take off my jacket. After a very pleasant 25 minutes of easy riding through the lovely Wiltshire countryside, I reached my first stop, the Claverton Pumping Station (described in an upcoming blog entry). What I expected to be a rather short visit turned into an almost 1 hour stay. Noticing that the sky was darkening, I begged off the video portion of the tour, unlocked my bike, and pedaled up a steep hill back to the canal level.  During the next several miles, I crossed two very spectacular aqueducts, the Dundas Aqueduct, which was next to a wharf with small crane, and the Avoncliff Aqueduct.  I continued on to Bradford, where I stopped briefly at the early 14th century tithe barn.

In a 2-mile stretch between Foxhanger and Devises, the canal rises 237 feet, for a 1 in 44 gradient. Chief Engineer John Rennie dealt with the steep rise at Caen Hill by building a set of 16 locks in a row. This is considered one of the most significant engineering achievements on the entire British canal system, and in contrast to the Ratty & Mole ambience of much of the waterway, it makes for a dramatic feature.  It requires a lot of water to fill up a lock. In order to ensure enough water for this aquatic staircase, Rennie excavated large basins extending sideways (to the left in the photo above) in front of 15 of the Caen Hill locks.  I rode up the steep hill, passing several bikers who decided to walk, stopped to take a few more pictures of the ponds and narrow boats in the lockes, and then headed into Devises.  It was almost 2pm, it was starting to drizzle, so I asked for directions to a pub. Riding into the center of town, I stopped at The Castle Hotel for a lunch of cottage pie and a pint.  The proprietor of this 18th century pub let me park my bike indoors.

After lunch, I wound through town looking for the Cycle Route. After 10 minutes of what seemed like endless wandering through housing estates, I was suddenly confronted with a steep hill leading down to the canal and its narrow tow path. I walked down. After less than a mile, a sign for the Cycle Route pointed up a steep incline away from the canal. I decided to tough it out, and ride up. It was going fine until I reached the top and had to immediately stop. Fortunately, there was a bed of stinging nettles to catch me.

Devises is nearly at the top of the canal, and after 22 miles, I naively thought that I was done climbing for the day. The reality was that I would spend the next 24 miles zig-zagging from one side of the Vale of Pewsey to the other, crossing the canal and railroad multiple times.  I climbed to the top of a ridge, where I had a fantastic 360 view of the mostly harvested fields and the ridge far to my north, which included one of Wiltshire’s famous white horses.

After Pewsey, the terrain become a bit more closed in again, with increasingly narrower roads, usually surrounded by hedge rows. Outside of Oare, the road chosen for the cycle route was barely a car width, and it had a light median of grass and gravel. It was also closed to traffic. A road closed sign is either a biker’s dream, or nightmare. I chose the former, and it turned out OK, leading me between beautiful farms with thatched roof houses, usually built on a timber frame several hundred years ago.

Especially after a hard climb to the summit, there is something thrilling about coasting down a long, windy, steep hill, hedgerows full of bramble and barbed wire whistling past your ears as you enjoy the sensation of speed and wind, and idly wonder just what you are going to do if the next turn confronts you with a fully loaded farm vehicle, or just an especially slippery patch of gravel.   I ended up taking a similar opportunity descending a steep road into the terminally charming village of Wootton Rivers.  In this case, it was actually only a Volvo, but given the deeply eroded ditch at the side of the road, it was more than big enough to test the emergency stopping abilities of the Kool-Stop brake shoes. They worked, and everyone came through the event intact. I had to prematurely terminate more than one long coast just in order to follow the bike route.

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I love biking in England.  The scenery is beautiful, the roads are smooth, the temperature is perfect, and the car drivers are used to dealing with bicycles.

Last weekend I had a fantastic 48-miler around Berkshire. If you’ve got Google Maps installed, you can follow the trip here (a version of the map appears at the bottom of this post) also, clicking on any of these photos will open up a larger version from the photo gallery for this trip).

The first couple miles of the trip weren’t very interesting, and there was a lot of fast traffic, but once I got out of Sunninghill and Ascot, I found myself on a very smooth and flat country road.  It wasn’t exactly traffic-free, but there weren’t a lot of cars. I saw at least half a dozen other bikers.  This was mostly farm country, and both sides of the road had large fields. Cresting a ridge, I could see for miles across the Thames Valley.

I made my first stop in Waltham St Laurence, a picturesque village with a number of interesting old buildings.  Spotting two bikers sitting in front of what was advertised as a 14th century pub (photo at top), I stopped for a chat and some water.  I got directions out of town, and had a couple more miles of country riding, before getting into the outskirts of Twyford and picking up route 4 of the National Cycle Network in Wargrave.  Outside of Wargrave, I soon found myself riding down a series of increasingly narrower lanes.

The road narrowed to a single lane as I crossed a steep ridge near Warren Row. This is what English cycling is all about: I was surrounded by cows and sheep, riding up and down on ancient roads, with nary a soul in sight. The descent down to the Thames was exhilarating, although my enthusiasm was tempered slightly by the knowledge that I’d have to climb back up.

At this point, I’d temporarily stopped following route 4, although I was still on a section of the Round Berkshire cycle route marked as route 58. After sweeping around some huge pastures and very posh estates, the route took a right on a much busier road, the A4130.  Stopping to photograph the side of a building and wondering when it was last possible to name something ‘Black Boys Inn’ (apparently, Charles II had an Italian granny), I checked my map and realized I could divert to the Thames.  I rode down a short hill, stopped for a moment to watch a thresher, and then continued down to the river.

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Last week, the biggest event here in the Ascot area–indeed, one of the big calendar events for the entire country–took place. Royal Ascot is a colorful, fascinating, and bizarrely British annual happening. It started as a horse race, but it got bigger.

The royals have always been keen on horses. They’ve always had a lot of acreage in the area of Windsor, so back in the early 18th century, they built a race track within a carriage ride of Windsor.

The track in Ascot has races and other events all year, but none are as famous or formal as the Royal Ascot week. The queen arrives every day in her carriage (belief is that half the trip is in a Range Rover), which crosses the length of the final part of the race track, and then she and her entourage walk up to the royal enclosure. The strict dress code of the royal enclosure has an impact on the entire event. Even the cameramen wear top hat and tails.

The pictures on my web site gallery are from ladies day last year. This is the Thursday event that includes the most outlandish hats and shoes. Royal Ascot is a place to see and be seen.

To be honest, I hardly saw a horse when we spent the day there last year. The people are a lot more interesting than the horses. It brings out the entire spectrum of English society, from the posh to the potted.

Most of the local cabbies try to avoid the event because they want to keep the back of their cars clean. When Royal Ascot is taking place, we follow the lead of our neighbors and stay off the roads.

America isn’t unique in having an affinity for pedigreed politicians (Bush, Kennedy, Adams, Taft, Roosevelt, and that once-again popular new breed, the Clinton). Lots of third world countries also choose their leaders from a small pool of advantaged families. Europe does also, with the Saxe-Coburg und Gothas  providing the breeding farm for royalty, although most of that breed are mascots without any ability to cause any harm beyond the occasional politically incorrect remark.

It recently hit the local news that the great symbol of British character, the English Bulldog, is considered to be inbred and genetically deficient. Last year’s symbolic RSPCA boycott of Crufts was just responded to by a kennel club pledge to improve the standard of several hundred breeds.

Who could have known that a Bulldog was inbred just by looking at one, right? Although with their mouths shut, Kennedy and Bush both look better than a Bulldog, neither  have the sort of eloquence that a selective breeder might desired. For inbred dogs, their bite is worse than their bark. For politicians, the opposite is the case.

Poor Churchill is not considered an appropriate use of the limited NHS funds available for orthodontia. I have to admit to little sympathy for the owners. I’m in support of greater genetic diversity for the dogs, who are really just victims of fashion, if not outright snobbishness.  A few years ago at a high school sporting event, I overheard some 14-year old girl bragging about her expensive Retriever that the white ones were much better than the plain out golden ones. Pity for the dysplasia-prone dog, who will probably be on crutches before her owner outgrows (I hope) her elitist phase.

The very word ‘purebred’ is a value statement all by itself.

I’ve been aware for some time that purebred dogs not only cost more than mutts, but they are less healthy, and in some cases, are even prone to violent outbreaks. I did do a bit of research into the Bulldog issue, quickly finding a long rant in a blog last year from some guy who spent $6,500 on a Bulldog from someone he thought was a reputable breeder, but the canine turned out to be ugly, and underweight, reaching only 40 pounds, instead of the expected 50.  Its an animal, not something predictable like a mortgage-backed security! A low-resiliency animal, it was deliberately bred to accentuate characteristics that will make it one of the first victims of the coming crisis.  Why people don’t take pride in having pets that can live out a pain-free life of relative health?  Oh, they will claim that its just the disreputable breeders responsible for substandard dogs, and just badly bred owners who are too ignorant or cheap to purchase well bred beasts.  No sale. Look at the picture. How can that possibly be healthy? These things are genetic disasters, fit for no purpose other than human whimsy. Its time for a new standard of pet desirability and breeding practice.  My prediction is that it will never happen until dog-pound dogs are considered ‘cool.’