so i'm still getting quite excited about the tunnel
we're already now entering what appears in my book to be a cutting
you know if they wanted to open the tunnel there if you can see it Amy if
they want to open that tunnel could you put barges through there and
have bats living in there at the same
time
good morning everybody welcome to uh the whitewicks my name is paul this is
rebecca we make videos about old landscapes our
old abandoned railways abandoned canals old roman roads you name it whatever
sort of ticks are interested at the time today we have a guide today we're
exploring basingstoke canal and said the last five miles of it
and we have a guy called matt hello you can follow matt
on twitter i shall put his little link here matt has a knowledge on canals
so we have nicked his knowledge today for this short trip
anyway onwards to the basingstoke canal
so you find us in this beautiful part of north hampshire
looking for what remains of the basinstoke canal
now we're not obviously looking for the entire canal because it goes all out to
london but what we are looking for is what's
referred to as the last five miles so that's pretty much from basingstoke
itself across to grey well tunnel first of all though you find us near a
basin stoke looking for a little tunnel bridge right
whilst i've once i filmed matt coming out the hedge um we're trying to get
down to the um the bridge the tunnel bridge a little
yard down there it's got a little fire going so we're a bit skeptical about
getting down there we couldn't get down that side because it's too damn steep
um i'm wondering if what you stood on there matt is maybe some kind of um
old spoil heap it's certainly seen by that from somewhere
is in it very acidic from where they are they cut the cuttings out and
everything else that was there but it's incredibly steep cutting for a
small bridge see water stagnant yeah
stagnant water i think you can even smell the water a little bit perhaps
so in terms of water settled in canal this is the first point
um east of basingstoke where there is obviously a significant amount of water
so we've been chatting with matt online for sort of a good month or so
um about this canal and others as well matt sent us a whole bunch of huge
detailed sort of report on what you can see in
this area and on this part of the canal to the west of the grey world tunnel so
we just thought well we could take matt's um
detailed sort of a bit of paper out or we could actually just ask matt to come
along so matt kindly said yes he'd love to
um i think he was loved there matt but i don't think you actually said you'd love
to did you oh i think we forced matt to come out couldn't come up with a good
enough excuse not exactly so you know tough luck he's walking whether he likes
it or not right onwards matt towards grey world tunnel and all the
interesting things along the way let's go
well so matt we're coming up to a bridge that you were keen to show us
a very quirky reason it's this is brick kiln bridge
okay and the two um what's the word parapets
yep they're um remarkably different okay so this one has got quite a peak to
it yes and this side i guess is different
that is very different it's sloped almost
the peak is here isn't it over one side and do we know why or
we just we don't well we don't no there's somebody may well do
so brick hill bridge we've got a couple more bridges of interest and then we've
got the greywell tunnel
so this mat is the the junction i want to call it you said the junction
yeah this is so main line of the canal carries on sort of 90 degrees
yep we can carry on walking here up what's called the nately brickworks arm
brickworks you're saying opened like a hundred years after i
think it was late 19th century right i don't think it um
ran for that long i think the quality of the bricks was pretty uh
pretty poor now this is really interesting because
before the tunnel was built which we see shortly which is that way
they were the original plan of this canal was to head
north is that right matt yep a big loop north round a village called rotherwick
yep and that would have taken the canal sort of a seven and seven and a half
mile loop right around um to basically the
other side of the grey world tunnel and what's really
odd is we think it would have taken this um that that route there but this
wasn't opened for 100 years after the canal was built
so we're trying to work out the logistics of that we're trying to work
out maybe if this was built and then abandoned
before they decided to go that way for the tunnel
um we're not 100 sure so what do you want to do matt we're going to walk up
there for a little bit yeah water okay we'll let's do that
we've just been down there to where there's like a little outlet or some
kind of cold or something um maybe an outlet for the actual um arm
of the canal we've also seen what's there which is
like um we're guessing it may be like a little
jetty sticking out perhaps matt hasn't seen that before having walked up here
quite a few times i believe before so you do find something every time you
come out it seems according to the basin stoke canal log
book the hull of the country's oldest horse-drawn narrowboat
was uncovered in the brickworks arm in 1985.
well we're going to head back down to the junction we're going to turn left
and we're going to head east towards the tunnel
so what might just point to that is really it's just a brick when you look
at it you wouldn't even notice this if you didn't know what you were looking
for there's a groove in the bridge why is
there a groove in the bridge matt it's from tow ropes from horses um so
when it's taught and the horse is uh is pulling
the the boat along over years and years of
uh friction against the brick yeah it's
it's worn away and it's it's quite smooth
it is isn't it and what's really interesting about that would completely
add up so without stepping back too far you've
got the bridge there um and the horse would clearly have to
go up there to the left which is not a great design if you're a
canal design engineer
okay we're here we're at tunnellidge i mean you know
i can get a couple of good shots in
there
so this end pretty sure is obviously home
to a lot of rare bats it's a bit like horsepower then
yeah exactly like horsepower so what if they wanted to open up and make a usable
tunnel again so i'm guessing they wouldn't be able to
because the species diversity here is hugely important
why well i'm not 100 sure i mean i know a little bit but it would be a very
sketchy answer but i know someone that would know the
answers let me give her a ring
okay it's ringing um amy how's it going my aunt's going pretty well amy can can
we talk bats for a second but do you mean these kind of bats no no
um like bats as in like um you know bats
you mean one of these yes that's it right so from an environmentalist point
of view and from an ethical point of view
can we talk about bats and this tunnel uh don't already have an
environmentalist agree paul um yeah admittedly i have um but i think i
was probably away they did the the ethics side of things um and
besides they really didn't our teacher how to sit on a fence
oh that sounds a bit painful okay so what do you need to know okay
so why exactly is species diversity important and not just like genuine
general bats in particular perhaps yeah species diversity is absolutely
crucial to life so each former species i.e bats insects
plants are entwined in the chain of the ecosystem
both locally and further field for example some species only exist
because they specifically rely on another species so that might be
a plant it might be a species of predator that relies on a particular
type of prey so if you take one of these links out of
the ecosystem chain it causes knock-on effects and of course
that essentially causes a collapse over a period of time
but they're just as important as daytime predators as well but they're
obviously the nighttime predators they provide an amazing service to
agriculture and they maintain populations of insects
bats are actually really good they eat mosquitoes so they're a great ally to us
as humans and basically they can tell us in a nutshell
a great deal about the environment around us just by their presence alone
all right that's great so is there a way that bats and people can sort of cohabit
cohabit so you know if they wanted to open the
tunnel there if you can see it amy if they want to open that tunnel could you
put barges through there and have bats living in there at the
same time um i think there might be some split opinions on this matter everyone's
going to have their own view um however from personal experience i've
actually seen bats habitating tunnels and active tunnels as well
around the country on various canals they do seem quite comfortable in there
they've adapted well to human presence and the noises of narrowboats going
through i've heard of them roosting under railway bridges
as well quite close to canals too and they seem quite comfortable
in those environments too i think if a particular species is quite rare
i do think that there's going to be a lot of reluctance to actually disturb
them but if we take particular care think
about the bats that are living there and have a general respect for creatures
i think it's really important as humans that we actually embrace and
respect fellow wildlife and learn to coexist with them
all right thanks amy that was really comprehensive um well
cheers for that we'll see you later super great to see you
as with sabaton it's very bowed in certain places
we think we can see a collapse and i would say looking at this 100 yards in
i think so i wonder if the port or the hole would have been
around here right and that adds up because right here you've got some flat
work that way there so i reckon that is certainly evidence
in that so i reckon right here this is the tunnel portal right so the
final thing we want to do matt we're not going to go to the um
eastern end because as you said it's very very well documented
hundreds of pictures we'll even show you some pictures um we'll steal some of
that probably um but what we're gonna do is we what we
don't know about is shafts there are definitely shafts used to
build the tunnel but we don't know how many
we don't know if they've been in filled we don't know what state they're in if
so we know they got a couple wrong didn't we
i think they've got alignments the alignment which is brilliant
which is just that i love that fact i love the fact that if you go in there
you can find a shaft sort of covering where it would have been but it wasn't
quite in the middle it was just just off to the left and just left right
you don't often see that though do you no normally they're dead on it's like
amazing how they've managed to do it we're used to railway tunnels we used to
roll with someone's where it was much more of a science of course
so max matt's a bit bitter about that we're
railways his canals sorry matt a little bit more advanced
tunnel yeah proper property don't even get your
shovel
so we're probably now stood about 200 yards from the entrance to the
um western portal of the bay state gray whale tunnel now we're on top of the
alignment here and one like a bit of a basin
now i reckon this would line up very well with the claps that we saw
and i reckon you don't want to stand in that water over there for that reason
i wonder if that sunken bit of land there
is yeah we're only 20 yards up the height of the the water level of the
tunnel aren't we so i reckon that could well be where the collapse is
easier said than done probably do better okay
cuts right across yes i mean the big question is look at this
is that a shark or is it just some kids digging out a hole i don't know but
that's not what we've seen on the map what we've seen on the map is just here
through this hedge um again still above the alignment of
the canal
and here is a huge crater almost too big
wow
we're going to make some big assumptions again before we close off
because we're just headed north a little bit further and
another big pond on the dark pond we've got potential spoil heaps on this
side everything looks very man-made here there's channels cut everywhere
um and we're wondering if that is maybe again where they dug out a shaft and
they moved it in a different way it doesn't look quite the same as
sapperton in terms of the shafts and it was the same guy charles jones
jones yes yep so he was in charge of safington
tunnel for a little bit there was uh a tunnel up from manchester
yep came down and did sapperton for quite a while
dug most of it then was sacked and then ended up doing
uh and then he lived at the other end i i read
from a house house or an engineer's house somewhere near the east port
yeah um but yeah so we're gonna make an assumption that this quite possibly was
um another at least sort of where a shaft would have been
we if you know or if we miss some notes and you know how many shafts were dug
and sunk originally to build this it's a thousand yards if you go by the
same um workings as sapperton you're probably
looking at at least eight or nine along here
okay so from the from the the gray well hill
the um basing stoke canal we're going to bid you farewell and don't forget to
subscribe we always say that because um a lot of you watch but don't subscribe a
big thanks to matt our guest today and our tour guide along this
stretch of the bayesian stoke canal um and we will see you next time probably
an abandoned railway about a canal old roman road who knows thanks for
watching appreciate your support see you next time