infill Anagrams

Where are the “Brisk Wetlands”, and which canal is situated at “a runway end”? - and

why can’t you restore canals that never existed?

Scrambled restorations

Far be it from Navvies to suggest that any of our canal restoration projects are putting things in the wrong order... but... well... this is what happens when you quite literally do that. The following are anagrams of waterway restoration projects, almost all of which WRG volunteers have worked on. Apologies to the restoration groups involved if a few sound a little less than complimentary; on the other hand one or two are particularly apt...

1A runway end

2Red van mower

3Brisk wetlands

4De-rust a trow

5Rubble rot and money snatch

6Ditch feelers

7Cry dead-end, Sabrina

8Bum making arch

9Ancestral

10Clonking top

11Child Life

12North hate

13Tech riches

14Voters

15Sherry and port buns, eww!

16Gnat harm

17Fir fiddle

18Rich warm hutch

19A new ass

20Feral sod Answers next time

The canal that never was?

At the same time as Government department Defra spends a year and a half failing to make its mind up about whether it thinks it’s worth spending money keeping our navigable canal system going at all, despite the many public benefits it undoubtedly provides (see Editorial, pages 4-5), in Scotland and Wales they’re busy restoring one or two which were never navigable in the first place. First there was Cardiff. Impressed by how inner city ‘canal quarters’ have become the latest thing for urban regeneration planners (albeit not always for traditional waterways enthusiasts), Cardiff has decided it wants a canal quarter too. Only problem is that the one navigable canal it had, the Glamorganshire Canal, is so thoroughly buried under the city that nobody’s restoring it...

No problem. There’s a 180-year-old dock water supply feeder ‘canal’ that’s been buried since about 1950, and it’s now being uncovered to form the centrepiece of a regenerated Canal Quarter, making the Welsh capital “look similar to other UK cities like Manchester and Birmingham”.

Not to be outdone, Scotland is following with the Perth Canal, actually a mill stream with a short length where small boats once offloaded coal from bigger craft out on the Tay, and which was covered over in 1802, is proposed for ‘reopening’. The city’s Provost said it would make a transformation as great as the Dutch city of Utrecht which recently dug up a 1970s motorway and put back the canal which had existed there before.

Where next?

And finally...

If you’re dragging rubbish out of the BCN, or digging silt out of some long derelict lock, spare a thought for those in Wisconsin, where a recent fire in a canalside dairy led to a river of melted butter which spread (sorry!) to the adjacent historic Portage Canal and set.

Is that how Butterley Tunnel got its name?