what we try and do when we make these videos of abandoned railways and canals
is give you a good idea of what the landscape looks like today
in its abandoned form but perhaps more importantly what we also try and do is bring you the stories
of the the engineers that made these and some of the really crazy ideas that they came up with
so today's story you find us on the devon and cornwall border and
it really fits into that remit of some crazy engineering and really beautiful landscaping
welcome to the bude canal i'm paul and i'm
rebecca our journey started on the northernmost tip of the northernmost branch it was far too
windy to speak here but this is the tamar lower lake built to supply the entire canal with water
i suspect the landscape here has changed quite a lot but there is still a lot here to see
anyway let's head down this branch it's a bit less windy and we're in for an unplanned surprise
so we've just come down from the tamar lower lake the original feeder i always thought
this arm of the canal was just for uh water supply but actually of course straight away
we found the worthy wharf which implies obviously it was active and actively used
um there's even a sign here that says the worthy wolf display well the wolf display
and it's beautiful you can imagine now these tub boats uh lined up here in the chains that
they were in and of course supplying whatever was needed here probably coal i would imagine
up here when you said display i heard you even say this but it really went display so i think that's
that's that building over there right so i mean this is totally unexpected a bit boggy underfoot
oh wow rebecca this is like the museum
oh my goodness me what a treat this is
whoever's done this thank you this is wonderful there's so much in here that we're going to come
to in today's video not least the the design here of the tub boats with the wheels so the
tub boats they use their wheels so they go up and down the inclines and if you look closely
they even used um plate ways that sort of early railway tramways where it was just an l shape
to keep the wheels guided but as this was built sort of head on into the 1800s they're obviously
aware of these technologies so james green the engineer um decided to use it for his tuples
we'll come to more of that as we get to see some good examples but what a treat
so this is the bude canal now it was one of james green's early engineering projects very much
prominent in this area in fact we've done another video on a canal he made or constructed later in
his life the grand western now when you look at the bude canal it's cut almost into a cross shape
now there's a reason for each of those lines if you were each of those cuts
but first of all you find us on the northernmost one of those cuts and it is actually referred to
as the bude aqueduct and this is just beautiful this is such a good example
of an abandoned canal hardly untouched in a hundred and thirty years or so yes this is if
it was full of water you wouldn't know any difference it's just bizarre
tantalizingly close right in front of me is this bog and i really wanted to show you this aqueduct
virorthy aqueduct which is right there it's like five feet but it's so overgrown i can't
see any masonry nothing um i just can't step one foot further forward for fear of
standing in two feet of bog um so close so far rebecca this reminds me of like a log flume
it's that well defined it's that well cut it's fin that the tub boats use and again we'll come see
the tub boats used were they look like lovely little orphans they're five or six feet wide
20 feet long and they used to go in chains of you know tubs pulled by a horse along this tow
path it's very top off and yeah it's like you can imagine it it's perfect this is such a treat today
so we're now arriving right here we're now arriving at the
first junction so we said this canal had four arms to it or four points well we've come along
the northern one and right there looking that way is the holes worthy branch now
that was eventually what would kill this canal off the arrival of the railways at holsworthy in
around 1880 or maybe just before 1880 meant that of course this canal was no longer fit for purpose
so this is now the holsworthy branch and again this section we're walking on is perfectly cut
still got quite a bit of water in actually and we're almost at the point where the southern
arm connects to us now now the southern arm is what the main arm of the canal is a main point
and it went down to launceston or nearly at launceston now we're not gonna do that number one
we have a lack of time it's already one o'clock in the afternoon and we've already done the feeder
and it's gonna be dark by four o'clock today but we are going to bring you any minute now some of
the ingenious uh bits of engineering on this canal we've been talking about for quite a while now
so james green didn't like wasting water and he'd seen sort of 20 or 30 years probably
of canals using locks and how much water that used for potentially one barge or vessel to go through
so he liked inclines and he really wanted to use inclines on this which is one of
his first projects the bude canal now just up ahead of us we've got
our first incline of today called vealand incline anytimes are fascinating they use
plate ways with the wheels on the tub boats the tub boats actually had wheels
so we're pretty sure we found the area where the water would have been
the very thin cut here would have been perfect housing for it behind me there
you've got where it would have been the reservoir to hold the water to power this
so you'd have to imagine right now there'd be a 50 foot diameter water wheel right here um i
guess it would have been bottom fed and therefore attached to some gearing that would attach to the
chains to pull the boats or fascinating stuff this is landscape this is
on this canal they used six inclines five of those inclines were similar to this one so remember
that's quite important for the next incline now as time went on they had many engineering problems
with lifting those tub boats in terms of chains snapping
uh or the gearing not working properly and uh yeah here we are right we are now actually at
the top of the incline you can tell that there's a sign there's a steep slope and another sign
that is a stone there with some pinholes in it
um yeah that's a stone with some pinholes in it which is definitely from how they
used to house the rails for the tub boat so here he is definitely one of the planes
i do love making videos about cows it's often at the early science of the era there was no
sort of blueprint that they use they came up with all these wonderful ideas and here we are
seeing james green try something new to him and relatively new to the to the world should we say
rebecca this is um the view that way is buudeiful!....
budutiful see what i've done now i've used the word bude the town with the beaut
and added it too beautiful chopped off that's well no no no it didn't someone literally
just text me said have a beautiful day you know who you are right we're at the top of
hobbacott and there's a massive drop off in front of us so you know what that means that
means another incline this incline was very different to the others potentially unique
so just in this field i think we found the top of the incline you've got a basin just there possibly
a hut built for the person or the people that controlled the plane and that side there you've
got to drop off of the edge we're going to go down this pathway here which is permissive and see if
we can find some of the bits of infrastructure and why this is quite a unique incline plane
so why was this incline different to the others well it was based on the mechanism that it used
to get the tubs up and down the hill so i think inside this hedge here
there would have been a shaft and it held two
large buckets that could each take 15 tons of water now they were used attached to a drum
balanced and in the same way a water wheel would they would pull the tubs up and down they would
then empty that water out of the bucket through an adit which came out down the bottom of the hill
so we're just gonna have a walk down this incline and then regret it because we've gotta walk back
up again afterwards to get back to the car yeah but obviously we're now on uh the final part of
this journey we're missing the entire southern section that went down to launch and largely on
account of lack of time it's now help us two in the afternoon we need to get debuted because we
need to film some of the sea lock and the sand railway and all the bits down there so we're
heading down the incline here the reason i want to get to the bottom because i wonder
if there's anything that remains visible of the addict so at the top as i said a shaft went down
straight down there into the ground to the ground level
with the buckets of water where emptied them along and add it
so here we are bottom of hobbacott incline
and the two passageways in i i assume these were passageways in for an up and down nature where um
one was pulled up on a chain one was pulled down i think that's how it worked here and
i'm also wondering if down there i can see an outlet i wonder if that is the outlet for the
add it is very very small perhaps two feet high one foot wide but that could well be the outlet
for the water might not have been that side i was looking at could well have been that side
feels just fairly solid
underfoot
oh yeah so i think we found the outlet for the 15 tons of water that would have come down here
as one of the buckets was emptied into the attic so got a scout down here
just just check the shots on the camera look amazing pretty sure that was it
let's try and get out of here
the clouds have caught us up it's very wet well it's not very wet it's a little bit wet
windy very windy beaut we finally made it to bude we haven't scratched the surface of this
canal largely due to the lack of light in the day at the moment it's 3 p.m now
we've done a couple of inclines and a few of the things we really wanted to show you
there's such a lot more but there is the old wharf just across the way the wharf building
is very beautiful we're just gonna yeah it is indeed yeah we're gonna head out now towards
the sea show you the sea look and give you the main reason why this canal was built
so this part of the car is still in use and it goes two miles back that way to the first incline
where that is that sort of end of the road for the canal now just ahead of us if you can still
hear us because it's so windy it's really windy just ahead of us is the reason why this canal was
first built but i couldn't even breathe it for a second um it's such a choppy day even the bit
of canal in front of us here is choppy there's only a few hundred yards long but um yeah ahead
of us is the reason this canal was built in the first place but will we get there i don't know
we're now walking on a railway and this was a railway built for small trucks to bring sand so
they transported sand up onto the canal there now why would you do that because sand is sand it's
in abundance everywhere isn't it well no because this sound was different this sand contained quite
a lot of lime which i understand was acted as a very good fertilizer so one of the big successes
of this canal was its ability to provide lime to fertilize all of the local farms inland and that
was so much better than the roads they already had because it allowed it to be distributed all that
to holsworthy down to launch them and of course it even imported coal from the south of england
um this is quite a beautiful landscape here it's gorgeous and we're now walking on some
really dodgy looking old rails which as we say brought the sand up to barge level just wonderful
right beaut beach we've nearly lost the light now
we've seen the beautiful sea lock back there obviously reconstructed in year 2000 i think
now the railway would have come down on here down the slope you can see in the distance and onto the
beach and i wonder if they move the rails to take chunks of sand up each time i don't know who knows
along the way but that's it from us there's so much more in this canal we haven't bought you
due to lack of time so maybe another day we'll do the southern arm but there's not much access
um it's getting windier and windier we're just gonna have a look at the beach um
right as always thanks for watching if you haven't subscribed and you like this sort of stuff
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