just ahead of us there is the mouth of the river Ouse, now for those of you that might be thinking,
yes paul and rebecca those famous youtubers that explore old abandoned railways canals navigations
and such have finally come to my area well it just so turns out that there are Seven River Ouses in
this country, now this particular one heads down from the haywards heath type area right down here
to the coast at new haven and today we're exploring the old navigation that it was
so on our little channel we do love exploring and telling you the story
of old abandoned railways and canals and roadways but they're often from post-industrial revolution
well today's story is from the very early industrial revolution and maybe even before that
to a degree now people did move stuff up and down route ways then but the biggest
problem they had with this route way was the fact it was actually a river
so the river ooze certainly this river ooze here in sussex was mentioned as far back as record
sort of a lao 1086 the doomsday book and there on after many times largely because of its inability
to drain well and all the meadows here that we're just walking past now used to flood a lot and
there were continued efforts to try and stop that so if you imagine back down at new haven where
there is a huge breakwater well there didn't used to be that breakwater and a shingle bars used to
settle in front of the the entrance and the entrance used to fluctuate all year
round so there were various attempts in the last thousand years to try and stop that from happening
our first crossing of the day and uh still inevitable on a uh using a car despite the
fact it looks like it's made from planks but it's got all sorts of weird and wonderful um rock all
those red like peer-like structures i wonder if this was a very different thing a few years back
1422 1539 1731 1767 there were recorded attempts did you like that recollection that was that was
impressive there were recorded attempts to sort all these problems out so the meadows out
yeah turns out that it was a swing bridge built in 1790 we'll come to the reason it was built in 1790
very shortly because that's quite important but i guess that's part of the mechanism
if you just walk over to the other side you can see
that the central central pivot of the swing bridge is just over there on that section
so it's 1767 and industry around the country is starting to be taken a bit more seriously
and in this area they had the river ooze and they've been trying to manage it in in part for
800 years or so perhaps more so 1767 john smith and her engineer is tasked with
trying to solve the problem certainly of the meadows and it comes up with a number
of different solutions but only one of them is taken up which is basically just straightening
out of large sections which we've already seen back south of lewes we're now at barker mills
which is very beautiful right it's very pretty yeah there's probably a lot here we're not really
understanding about what happened here we maybe need to do a little bit more wandering in research
all right hi how you doing i'm doing fine how you doing good well i'm i feel like there's a
lot more at barcombe mills we haven't seen yet I think there's a lot well i can hear water a
lot that way over the bridge and it looks a bit rickety to be fair the bridge is pinned about
25 times got a massive crack down the middle uh but looks quite connected
so maybe 1767 was a little bit too early for john Smeaton's plans but within 20 years
1788 in fact william jessop was tasked with trying to work out if the ouse could be used as a proper
navigation in perhaps a more canal-like sense and he did within six months to a year or so
william jessop has said that it could be navigated right up to balcombe i think towards
linford hayward's heath area and it could be done four feet deep and up to 24 feet
wide in places that is perfect to carry vessels which could haul 30 tons or more
so we're just looking for a specific spot on the ooze we're going to show you a cut and some locks
just come across the lavender line um now i'd heard of the lavender line but didn't really know
where it was but just found it by all accounts yeah oxford to uh lewes and i think their goal
is to join the two but yeah really beautiful this little station isfed, isfield is food
yeah should have paid attention um it's quite beautiful as close today as they always are
when we turn up i think that's like a i think this one might be closed for a while actually
because there's another bigger sign that says we are closed please check out our website
so this is isfield church very picturesque probably about half a kilometer maybe a
kilometer away from any civilization which rings a bell from the whole dorset lost villages video
doesn't it where they moved church stayed where it was and they moved the village
really picturesque church what we're trying to find is the ooze as we've said
and somewhere out the back here is a mott and bailey is that the right pronunciation i believe
it is ahead of us now i think you can see it both works how we get there though i have no idea um
because we really wanted to show you there's a cut and locks and bits and we're going to talk about
the next stages of this navigation and what happened thereafter do you need a loop
um two things number one what's that don't know back of a churchyard kind
of right down in the nook and cranny number two
private private private private private private private private private there's a mock and bailey
there that's probably as old as the village itself next to the churchyard there's the beautiful river
oohs down there where there's a cut made 220 years ago there's a lock just over there there's
pathways the other side of the river but you have to go back 400 miles south or north to get to it
there's an old what looks like abandoned road beside this church
which goes to nowhere well there's a mystery in itself but you can't get there
because you know what there's a landowner that doesn't want you to get there despite the fact
they're not using it for anything not even categorizing no crops nothing just a lovely open
green grass and left fallow but you can't go there because it's private
um you finish renting yeah okay should we move on to what we're doing next yeah okay
so just below me is freshfield lock and it's in quite a uh quite a state now you might not even
notice here if you sort of walk past it and don't look hard so come 1790 the navigation is underway
william jessup chose pinkerton some contractors he'd already worked with to make this navigable
it's overseen by the commissioners and the the people that would eventually charge tolls on here
and by 1793 they decide that workers have sub-standard it's not moving forward fast enough
i suspect was their largest complaint and they'd only made it to this point sheffield bridge which
is around here somewhere we can't find where it is because you can't walk anywhere because we're
in sussex and england they'd only made it here so three years of canal building some locks no
tunnels no major earthworks and they'd only made it to this point there's a lot more to be done
now what to compound matters come 1795 they're only taking in 230 pounds a year on tolls from the
navigation now bear in mind it costs 20 000 pounds to build that's nowhere near the kind of ratio of
return you'd want on a profitable business so 1797 the canal is in the hands of the receivers
it would take almost another 10 years to get things going
the appointment of william smith a geologist who worked on the summer set shire coal canal
and a contractor willing to take part payment and the rest in shares and bonds 1809
and we are now at linford mill to the north of hayward's heath things are finally moving forward
so we're nearing the end of today's journey we've gone past hayward heath and linfield and i think
that bit was abandoned from 1860 onwards we still got some of the story to tell when we make these
videos we try and do the research of where all the bits are that you can still see today
and despite the fact that there was something like between 20 and 30 locks on this canal
we couldn't find them i think we found one haven't we that we can get to
there's so many or so much of this is on private land so much of this part of the country is just
not for the likes of you and i unfortunately we thought we'd see a lot more i guess is what i'm
trying to say to we're now a good example of this is we're now at ryeland's lock and we expected
to see something maybe because it's quite a remote little part of this uh this country
and there's a nice cut of the of the navigation there you can see the sides cut straight still
but once again i don't know what that is perhaps some kind of water utility building or something
directly something similar to that and they've just trashed it completely so there should be
an old block basically it's just concrete sided and it's a load of old it sums today up didn't
really sums today up but on the upside it's been lovely weather yeah we got good weather
so the irony being that this navigation was said to help uh bring 10 million bricks over from the
netherlands up the navigation and help build the balcombe viaduct and within 20 years of the london
and brighton railway opening this section of the canal canal the navigation had been abandoned
again this part of the the cut the navigation we've got sort of steep cut in banks
nothing elaborate about it no sort of real toe path because everything is
flat the other side of it um and yeah it's very stupid cut and straight all the way down here
which leads you to wonder where the original ooze went and i wonder if it's this filled boundary
here where it sort of meanders and curves because this section ahead of us just goes
straight as you can see right up to the balcombe viaduct
so what became of this navigation well like so many others or so many other canals their demise
was in the form of the railway so we've already mentioned the london and
brighton railway but then there were two or three more that came sort of replicated
this navigation's journey so it largely became pointless the lower end of it from lewes down to
new new haven well that stayed open i think until 1950 on account that there were some
significant cement works there and even today i think we saw a huge great ship didn't we
oh god massive so i'm guessing it is still a port in its own right very
important so ahead of us is the very beautiful Balcombe video to the ooze valley viaduct or
the ooze violet we're going to call it i have to say if you ever in this area come and see it
is amazing and the navigation ends almost just before as far as we know in terms of
its fur this navigable point i don't know if there's a small wharf there or something but
again there's nothing really here um rebecca tells me i need to apologize today because
I've been quite grumpy haven't i yeah it's been a little bit underwhelming we thought we'd find more
but we sort of tell you the story anyway because it's been quite interesting but
we thought we'd find more more locks there's probably some out there we didn't find them
in our research or our um meanderings today but there you go we tried we did
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