hi little known fact i hold the world record for the fastest time that anybody....
I'll come back to that at the end of the video which today
is sponsored by the good people at Plum more on both those very shortly
if there's one thing that continues to fall into my net of interesting things it's quirky
transport history it's the things that the engineers of the time two centuries
ago came up with to navigate their way through the country the things that they invented to navigate
their way through the terrain that was truly cutting edge for the technology of their time
today's video really cunjores up that image perfectly it really shows how they pushed the
envelope pushed the end but who wrote this script sorry it underlines how the engineers of the time
really pushed the limitations of their knowledge the engineering knowledge at the time
today's short walk will see us enter devises from the east side devices in wheelchair
first of all we've got to navigate this this is the 500 yard Bruce tunnel now it doesn't have a
towpath as such so we're going to navigate our way over the top it was open in 1809 purely duplicate
the landowners thomas Bruce and his son Charles there is no functional purpose for this tunnel
whatsoever and there is no towpath for the boaters to use at the time instead they used the chains
along the walls here to pull themselves through it would have been 500 yards of arduous work
so just heading down to the western port of the bruce tunnel
and just gonna go under the railway here first
now for the eagle-eyed viewer you'll note that when we were on the eastern portal
the railway was to our north but now we're at the western port of the road is on our south that's
because the railway utilized the top of the tunnel to change its direction and running with the canal
also on top of the canal tunnel there was a branch that branched off north towards
marlborough that's a story for another day and there is the very beautiful Bruce tunnel
anyway enough for tunnels let's head on to devizes for the main story.
all right you've done the good bits yet yeah they're all good bits so aren't we yeah true
but what about the bits about the lock and the record true but i was going to leave
that to sort of mid way almost at the end of the video keep the viewers watching you know yeah i
suppose that does make sense well in that case in the meantime let's see your plums my plums
what are these no not those plums oh okay okay well what plums do you mean yeah oh the app well
that would be plum if we both got the app surely it's plural it's plums oh good point so recently
rebecca and i have been using an app called plum now for anything like the two of us we
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and if we have a good month we tend to just reinvest it or we end up spending it and
that's where plum comes in handy it's a free to download app that helps you save easily plumb is
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dooblydoo below right I'm off to go film at the rest of the video okay I'll see you see you later
so this is us approaching Devizes from the east now you may remember about a year ago
we made a video about the the town that was too high for its railway devises
50 years prior to the coming of the railway the canal engineers
had exactly the same problem but they came up with something quite ingenious to overcome that issue
have a look at Devizes on a relief map as a market town with a castle built in 1080 a.d its roots lie
in its geography a settlement which sat 125 metres above sea level on a ridge overlooking to the west
so that's great if you're trying to defend your town but what if you're trying to build a canal
clearly you need some locks now locks weren't a new invention for canals obviously
what was new was 29 of them over a 2.5 mile stretch luring the canal to the east by around
72 to 75 meters now that record of 29 locks in a single flight was soon beaten by the
Birmingham and Worcester canal but what wasn't beaten was doing that over such a short distance
and a greater height that the devises and the cane hill locks achieved
it's difficult to know why the lock stretch here was chosen over boat lifts and inclines
which were fairly popular at the time and were used in a number of different places
around the country perhaps four thought of john rennie seeing that they didn't quite
beat the lock especially the failed lift and inclines at somerset coal canal
now the kennet and avon part funded the crazy csions at Coombe Hay so maybe rennie did
indeed question their viability and stuck with the trusted lock here at cane hill
so between 1803 and 1810 the kennet and Avon canal was complete apart from this section of the Caen
hill locks and to connect those whilst they were building the canal locks they used a horse-drawn
tramway double-tracked in fact this bridge was built for them or the underpass was built for the
tramway now it always strikes me as a little bit of irony behind that as with the blisworth tunnel
they used a railway to connect either end of the canal and they didn't have the forethought to
think that the railways in this case an ironclad wooden sleeper railway which sounds very modern
they didn't have the forethought to think that i would eventually put these guys out of business
so you'll have noticed that the lock chambers are made from a brick and a little bit of
masonry so the brick was made of clay dug from here between locks 29 and 35 and there's a huge
pit just down here on the south side of the canal just take a look how vast this is
i've come to the bottom of this clay pit because i really wanted
to see how deep it was i think i'm about 15 meters from the top and
that there is just thick brown vegetation so i can't go any further
whatever vast excavation this was late 1700s early 1800s to build the bricks and line the canal
so to prevent flooding downstream to prevent all these locks running dry they had to build
a balancing storage at every lock on this Caen hill stretch and there's one just here next to
this lock obviously lock number 31 just there now that's 0.3 hectares of surface area of lock
and what that did was is it stretched the distance out between each lock and it meant
that indeed they didn't run dry and they didn't flood downstream all whilst in use
so as the evolution of the canal moved forward and it kept up with modern technology come 1829
they installed gas lights all the way along this flight now that would mean that you had to pay
a shilling if you went overnight to use it and that lasted until 1843.
so what became of the kennet and Avon canal why did its fate not end up in the same way
as any other canals down here in the south of England what became of john rennie's magnificent
engineering achievement here at Devizes with the Caen hill locks well the canal officially stopped
in 1948 so you'd assume that perhaps like the railways the buses in modern transport the car
killed off but it did actually fall into disrepair a lot earlier than that sort of 1840s 1850s when
the coming of the GWR line really put a nail in its coffin back to modern era the early 1990s and
the canal trust set up here number of volunteers while they managed to open it back up again and
perhaps now it's taking its most valuable source of income to date which is of course the tourist.
Are you ready quick uh well you know you're like you've been waffling this is very true hopefully
you guys have enjoyed that little presentation about the Caen hill locks been mean to this for
a very long time because it's quite local and it's very beautiful uh don't forget to sign up
to plum how can they sign up to plumber um in the doobly-doo or the ping comment below hit that link
yes download the app for free for free and plumb will match one person chosen at randomly your
savings for eight weeks as in the eight weeks that you've been having the app and saving yes but only
if you click on one of our links yep right uh thanks for watching we'll see you next week
i'm such a wally yep I'm not gonna deny that okay so we had all that opportunity yesterday
to talk about the world record when we're out next to the canal and i completely forgot
so 2008 2009 my father owned a narrowboat and he convinced uh somebody he knew at the bbc wiltshire
to come out with us for the day or morning and attempt what we thought would be a world record
of scaling the Caen hill locks the uh 16 the immediate straight flight devises there
within that sort of half mile stretch and we did it within 1 hour 27 minutes with bbc
whiltshire sort of timing us and i don't think it went into the Guinness book of
records and like that but one hour 27 minutes so put a comment in the description below
if you've been in one hour 27 minutes or if you've done it in an uber long time yeah we
went horribly wrong we want to know your stories yeah absolutely so if you if you've done Caen
hill locks what do you think let us know in the comments below um right so we'll see you next week