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and Gloucestershire Canal
Restoration feature
WRG returns to the Herefordshire & Gloucestershire Canal this summer for the
The 2022 WRG Canal Camps programme marks our first visit to the Herefordshire & Gloucestershire Canal Trust’s major new project to create a brand new length of canal at Malswick. But it isn’t WRG’s first involvement in the H&G Canal by any means – as those volunteers who remember the Over Basin project and other earlier work will recall...
The restoration back-story The H&G
was one of the later restoration projects to get started – largely, I suspect, because it had been closed so early and parts of it had been so thorough trashed after its closure (pretty much the entire south eastern half of the route was used as the basis for the Gloucester to Ledbury railway line) that it wasn’t seen as feasible to restore. “Nobody is going to restore it”, said Ronald Russell, writing in the classic derelict canal explorers’ bible Lost Canals and Waterways of Britain in 1982, while David Bick, writing the standard history of the canal in 1979 said it was more lost in obscurity than any other major navigation in England.
But come 1983 and the Herefordshire & Gloucestershire Canal Society (it later changed from Society to Trust) was founded – if not actually aiming to reopen the canal throughout, then at least with the goal of opening up some short lengths and preserving some of the few surviving structures to give an impression of what the canal would have been like when it was working.
Given that they didn’t initially envisage full reopening, there was no reason to attempt to follow a logical programme, starting at the Gloucester end and working north westwards to Hereford. But in all honesty, the state of the canal meant that wouldn’t really have been an option anyway. Whatever their long term plans, they needed to find a length that was restorable by a newlyformed volunteer group with modest resources.
So they began on the Hereford to Ledbury length (the half of the canal which hadn’t been used for a railway line), and their first worksite was at Monkhide, roughly midway between Hereford and Ledbury, where a rural stretch of canal hadn’t been too badly damaged, the landowner was a canal society member, and there was a very unusual surviving structure to restore.
This was the Skew Bridge, which has the distinction of being possibly the most acute skew bridge in the country. And nobody really knows why it was built like that –
Pictures by Martin Ludgate unless credited
Herefordshire & Gloucestershire
first Canal Camps for some years. We take an in-depth look at the waterway...
it carries such a tiny country lane that it wouldn’t have been an issue to put a couple of sharp bends in the road and cross the canal at right angles. Maybe the engineer Stephen Ballard did it simply because he could!
By 1987 a length of canal had been restored, and the bridge had been cleared of creepers – and given Grade II listed status.
By this point some of the members were thinking that reopening the canal might be possible as a long-term target – and one of them thought it might be a good idea to ask well-respected canal historian Charles
Herefordshire & Gloucestershire Canal
Length: 34 miles Locks: 23 Date closed: 1881
The Herefordshire & Gloucestershire Canal had the misfortune to be begun during the Canal Mania, when the success of some of the early canals led to a rush of speculative construction of waterways, some of which turned out not to be very
Site for 2022 profitable at all; but not to be com- Canal Camps pleted until the Railway Mania, when canals had begun losing trade to the newer form of transport. A not particularly promising route as regards trade (it didn’t go through anywhere industrial) meant that a canal from the Severn at Gloucester to Hereford was unlikely to be wildly profitable. Unfortunately its prospects were made even worse by a decision to change the route to go via Newent (rather than following the River Leadon valley all the way to Ledbury) in the hope of serving a small new coalfield. The coal turned out to be very poor, the diversion added a long tunnel at Oxenhall, and all the money to build the canal had been spent by the time it reached Ledbury. However an enthusiastic young man named Stephen Ballard joined the canal company and convinced them that if they could somehow raise the money to get to Hereford the canal would be a success. It got there in the end, but it was never busy, and soon railways were threatening its trade. The company made the best of a bad job by selling out to a railway company who closed the canal in 1881 and used parts of the Gloucester to Ledbury length as a route for a railway line. The railway in turn closed in 1959, apart from the Gloucester to Newent section which carried freight for another five years. page 21
Hadfield for his view. His response was that like the Thames & Severn, the Wey & Arun and the Grantham, it was a hopeless case, and like these it would end up as a hobby for “a few dozen enthusiasts who potter around in wellies” pretending to be doing good when actually all they were doing was “to inflate their egos”. Thus encouraged, the H&GCT duly took up the cause of full reopening of the canal, and in 1990 the first local authority supported this goal by protecting its part of the route. Two years later this protection was tested by a proposal to build a new Hereford bypass road, the Canal Trust made a very good case for including a navigable culvert where it crossed the canal, and won the argument with the Department of Transport. The road wasn’t built (and still hasn’t been), but if and when it is, there will be a canal bridge. And a few years later when an existing road bridge at Roman Road on the edge of Hereford needed replacing, it was replaced with a full navigable sized concrete culvert.
Meanwhile practical work on the ground had begun on the south eastern (Ledbury to Gloucester) length too, on a section near Newent where the railway diverged from the canal for a few miles (mainly to avoid Oxenhall Tunnel), leaving some better preserved remains of canal channel and structures. They still weren’t exactly well-preserved, as the first regular visiting working parties by WRG and the other mobile groups found when they adopted House Lock at Oxenhall as a project under the Dig Deep scheme (an initiative by the mobile
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Unknown 2005 Canal Camp working on rebuilding the stone bank below House Lock and (below) patching a hole in Ell Brook Aqueduct
groups to commit to a certain amount of work between them on particular projects, as a way of enabling the Canal Trusts to commit to funding the work). This ran through the mid 1990s and saw the entire stone-built lock plus its bywash completely rebuilt. This length became a focus for work, with the towpath opened through from the tunnel mouth to the edge of Newent, and later the Ell Brook Aqueduct completely restored.
It was still very much a ‘work wherever you can’ type of restoration, but in 1999 it became more of a case of ‘work where you have to’ – because at Over, where the canal joined the River Severn on the edge of Gloucester, a housing development was planned which required a major input from the canal society and visiting volunteers, to a tight timescale. On a former hospital site, the main building was to be converted to flats
Transformation at Over Basin: work on the wharf wall under way in early 2000, and completed
Return to Over: a machinery-based WRG camp works on the Vineyard Hill extension in 2012
and the other buildings demolished and replaced by new houses by a housing developer. But under a Section 106 planning agreement negotiated by the Canal Trust, in return for being given permission or the development, the developer would donate the land containing the first length of the canal to HGCT. And the Trust’s side of the bargain was that they had to complete the restoration (actually more like new construction) of the canal’s entrance basin including a lengthy wharf wall, the approach to the former entrance lock, a trailboat slipway, landscaping and various other works – and all within 18 months of being allowed on site. Failure to do so would have resulted in the land being forfeited to the developer, to do what they liked with (quite possibly, to bulldoze the whole lot on the grounds that it would be easier to sell houses if there was a piece of flat land there rather than a halfcompleted canal restoration site resembling the Somme in places...
Bad weather, terrible ground conditions and various delays getting started turned what was always going to be a challenging project into a near-impossible task, but with a massive input of labour from WRG and other visiting volunteers (including a whole series of ‘unofficial’ week-long camps and numerous extra weekends) plus the Trust’s own teams, the construction work was completed with a couple of weeks to spare – and in September 2000 the opening formed part of WRG’s 30th anniversary celebrations.
Having completed what was necessary for the S106 agreement, work then moved elsewhere again – almost to the very far end of the canal. At Aylestone, on the edge of Hereford, a new park was to be created –and the restored canal would be a feature of it. Once again visiting volunteers including WRG provided a useful contribution to the labour, including creating a slipway allowing trailboat events to take place in the completed park. And at Kymin East, between Aylestone and Monkhide, some heavy scrub and tree clearance took place including a WRG reunion dig in 2012.
Back at Over, more than a decade on from the original opening the Canal Trust began the Vineyard Hill project, extending the basin by recreating the next length of canal. This was the subject of a couple of very successful WRG specialist machinerybased camps in 2012.
This quick canter through the last four decades has mainly concentrated on the volunteer projects, and especially those that Navvies readers would have been interested in working on. But at the same time, HGCT was using its expertise at dealing with planning authorities to ensure that other canal restoration or reinstatement work was taking place wherever possible as part of developments along the line of the canal. These
have included a retail park in Hereford and a housing estate at Dymock among others, and there will be more to come – see below.
Where are we
at? Starting at the Gloucester end, we have the Over Basin and its extension at Vineyard Hill – although as yet it isn’t connected to the River Severn. There then follow several miles of canal from there northwards, which have yet to be tackled, and about which the most optimistic thing to say is probably that at least the railway (now itself long disused) which was built on parts of the route has helped to preserve some kind of possible alignment for restoration. But then it gets a bit more hopeful, with one section already reinstated and another at Malswick where work is just beginning, as we shall see.
Reaching Newent, there’s a rather tricky section where the town bypass, the former railway, and the old canal briefly all coincide, then there’s an awkward crossing of the Newent to Ledbury road where the levels are all completely wrong for reopening the canal. But then begins the stretch from the former Newent Station site via Ell Brook Aqueduct and House Lock (and two more locks still to be restored) to the south portal of Oxenhall Tunnel –which has the potential to become a showpiece
David Miller Aylestone Park: London WRG putting the finishing touches on the slipway... length of restored canal. The tunnel itself is in a bad way at the northern end, and parts of the bore are unlined, but the southern part is reckoned to be in better condition. It will be expensive, but is likely to be restorable rather than needing a replacement. And it conveniently gets the canal under the M50 motorway. The surviving northern approach cutting leads northwards to Dymock, site of the reinstated length mentioned above, then the canal (and its replacement the railway) runs ...and the finished slipway awaiting the arrival of the first trailboats page 25
through generally quiet country with few road crossings to the outskirts of Ledbury. Here, part the original route through the town (which included several locks which have disappeared under the later railway line) has been blocked by housing, but for a long time H&GCT has envisage the restored canal taking an alternative route around the west side of Ledbury alongside the bypass road, either running adjacent to the little River Leadon or perhaps actually sharing its course – and some of the bridges appear to be big enough for navigation.
To the north of Ledbury another new housing development looks set to provide a new length of canal to link up to the original route. From there onwards there are some substantial surviving remains of the canal including a three mile length that’s still in water and includes surviving bridges and a tunnel.
A missing section (including the A417 crossing) is followed by the first length to be restored at Monkhide, including the famous skew bridge plus another bridge (also built on the skew, but not by quite so much). On the far side of another main road (the A4103) needing a new crossing, the restored length continues through the Kymin East site, where the first lock leading downwards from the summit has seen some exploratory excavation.
There’s another tricky length (a missing aqueduct over the River Lugg and bridge under a railway – but Cotswold Canals Trust has recently shown that these things are by no means insuperable) but then comes the final length into Hereford, which has seen a lot of progress and looks set for some more.
The new Roman Road bridge is followed by the restored Aylestone Park length and then by a section at Holmer which will be made available to the Trust for restoration as part of a housing scheme. Aylestone Tunnel survives, and is followed by the retail park development mentioned above (including two new canal bridges). As the canal approaches the town centre there is another planned development which looks likely to create a length of canal as part of the planning agreement, then a length already owned by the Trust, then yet another development site with the potential to re-create a section of canal, and finally a possible new terminus basin on an adjacent site to the original one. So what next? The next major volunteer project is the one that WRG will be working on at this year’s Canal Camps – the Malswick length just south east of Newent. Here the original line of the canal has disappeared under the old railway embankment. But rather than dig this out and reinstate the
canal on its original route, it will actually be less work to build a brand new channel on an adjacent alignment. After a lengthy local authority planning application process involving a bat survey, a slow-worm survey, a newt survey and all the rest – the Trust got planning permission late in 2021 for work to start on building this.
Some preparatory work has already been done, but the Canal Camps will be doing a lot of the work, including not just the major muck-shifting to create the channel, but also installing two large (1.8m diameter) concrete culverts to carry streams under the future canal. All being well, the canal could be in water by 2023. And then what? At the same time as the volunteer effort is creating the new channel at Malswick, HGCT is also looking to make progress in the future at several other sites along the length.
We’ve already mentioned the developments which (with associated S106 or similar planning agreements) could see the reinstatement of several lengths of canal in Hereford. This could potentially create a navigable length leading from the town centre terminus right out into the countryside beyond Roman Road Bridge at Aylestone.
But there are a couple of other sites where H> is also looking to make some progress in the medium term future. Firstly there’s the entrance lock from the western channel River Severn at Over. This was a very deep lock (the structure was something like 9m deep altogether), and still only accessible from the rather tricky tidal river at certain states of the tide, and it would need re-connecting to the navigable eastern channel of the Severn by reinstating either the lock at Maisemore Weir or the one at Llanthony Weir. Yes, the entrance lock could be restored (it would actually be more of a new structure than a restoration) and boats could make their way via Llanthony or Maisemore locks, but the Trust is looking at whether there is a better alternative. These could take the form of: . A ‘level crossing’ of the western channel, with the entrance lock restored and another lock created on the opposite bank. The new lock would lead into the start of a new canal length running across the ‘island’ between the eastern and western channels, ending at a junction with the eastern channel opposite Gloucester Lock . An aqueduct over the western channel of the Severn, leading straight into the new canal cut across the ‘island’ formed by the eastern and western channels, leading to a junction with the eastern channel opposite Gloucester Lock
Finally, at Newent, the Trust has been considering the options for the tricky crossing of the Ledbury road. The problem here is that whereas the canal originally passed under the road via a hump-backed bridge, the later railway crossed over the road on a metal girder bridge. Trying to reinstate the original arrangements would fall foul of modern highways requirements regarding sight-lines over new bridges. But the alternative of using the old railway bridge abutments to install a new aqueduct (and making the old railway station a feature of the canal!) Newent road crossing: an inclined plane boat lift could span the gap would put the canal at a very difficult level from the point of view of water supplies and extra locks needed.
So HGCT has come up with an alternative – an inclined plane boat lift to carry boats up, over a bridge, and back down on the other side. This could be a ‘conventional’ (I hesitate to use that word in connection with a boat lift!) inclined plane, with tanks or (more likely) cradles running on railway tracks, hauled and lowered up and down the slopes on cables. But alternatively it could use concrete slopes with something more akin to the tractors and trolleys sometimes used by boatyards to pull boats up slipways for work. Given that the lift will slope down from the road bridge to the canal in both directions, the ability to shunt the tractor around the trolley at the top might make it easier than a rail-based system.
It’s still likely to be something of a long haul to get the canal open all the way from Gloucester to Hereford, but if HGCT can manage to pull off the ideas described in the last few paragraphs, there’s really no reason why they can’t put paid to the notion that “nobody is going to restore it” once and for all.
Martin Ludgate New canal bridge created as part of a retail development in Hereford page 28
