LOOKING BACK
by Roger Guttridge
The Dorset canal that wasn’t During Britain’s Industrial Revolution, 4,000 miles of canal were developed in an astonishingly short time – but in the end, Dorset didn’t get any! Roger Guttridge details the local planning catastrophe The sketch of Fiddleford showing plans for an aqueduct across the present-day A357 (modern map for comparison below)
As a veteran of canal holidays in the ’70s and ’80s, I’ve often wondered what Dorset would have been like had these arteries of the Industrial Revolution reached our county. They almost did: between 1796 and 1803, eight miles of the Dorset and Somerset Canal were constructed at the Somerset end. Had the ambitious project continued, parts of North Dorset would have been transformed, especially Fiddleford, where there were plans for an aqueduct fed by the Darknell Brook (see images, above). Had they come to pass, the Fiddleford Inn or the former Traveller’s Rest, two doors 42
away, might now be called the Narrowboat or the Boatman’s Rest. The feasibility of a ‘Dorset and Somerset Inland Navigation’ was first discussed at a meeting in Wincanton’s Bear Inn in January 1793, when canalmania was sweeping across the
entire country. In 80 years, 4,000 miles of canals were built, helping to transform both the national economy and local economies along their routes. The local plan was to provide a waterway link between Poole and Bristol – an alternative to
