one of the things that we waffle quite a lot about on this channel is how the
engineers of their time have built the routes that we we look at today the old Railways the
old canals and you join us today walking a short section of the Grand Union canal
now unlike many sections of any canals you'll Traverse today the section we're walking on
is straight for over 1 100 meters it doesn't hug the Contours of the land
and there's a good reason for that join us today as we explore the cuttings of tring
I keep taking a little Snippets of some masonry little Snippets
of indents in the the embankment of the canal for good reason because apparently
somewhere along here there's a tunnel or a heading I'll tell you why when
we just get to the actual straight bit of the Grand Union Canal here at tring
Union Canal there's a Grand Junction can out at one point yep finally opened its last section 1805
but we're not really here to cover the history we're here to Marvel at one of its greatest
um achievements which is believe it or not are they just a cutting it's more
than a cutting it's an immense um piece of engineering for the time it was Jessup and
Barnes ultimately came up with this route now when you normally get to the um the summit of
a canal you normally see a tunnel obviously normally you often see a tunnel but in this
case there's two Summits on this canal this is one of them here at tring and there's no tunnel
haven't there's a hole there's a tunnel so we found almost certainly The Heading now I'm
going to tell you what this heading was for this tunnel was full um in a bit not yet but bear in
mind so this looks like a I'm gonna say plate layers hot this is probably and this is just
me speculating built to cover up the tunnel that is down there I suppose that comes out
down there I'm just stick this camera and see if I can get some pictures and I'll show you
Wicked right not great pictures dark times but nevertheless there is a tunnel down there
um we won't touch any further we'll kind of walk on this way get ourselves over
to the railway and we'll tell you exactly what that was for
so there's a braunston tunnel like 20 30 miles ahead of us well that's one of the other Summits
that this Summit here at trink well this is obviously needed to feed him with water and
as ever they had issue with continued levels of water the engineers Barnes and Jessup had
a a number of different ways they were going to fill this one of them it's important to today's
video was a spring aquifers which were the spring England had Bolton spring or something like that
that was over to the east of this location again that's important we'll come to that very shortly
so our journey is going to take us slightly to the east now or directly to the east across to
the railway the next part of the journey to show you we're just looking actually down to our left
um well it's Marsh Croft Lane and it's all the bridges called but it's the
only access point over this thousand meter straight stretch of uh canal
so the second Summit of the Grand Union Canal was just left trim canal and a
reason why it's so straight is because it acted like a tunnel it just took
a straight line through the landscape we're gonna dig very deep like a tunnel
um so there are no more Contours to hug their Canal too this was as high as they were going
to get just here ahead of us now I can see it now there's another bridge this time for
a more modern form of Transport although a very early one 1837 the London to Birmingham
Railway opened and it's just ahead of us here probably about 200 meters we'll join you there
so just before we get to the railway just sort of stop at this field and Rebecca's pointed out
to what looked like shafts yeah and I said well there's no tunnels here of course not but then
we just we just discussed haven't we The Heading well it's probably yeah probably itself where we
just were so I wonder if you're I wonder if they are at least construction shafts that remain from
that heading it's almost time that we need to tell you what about heading slash tunnel was for Okay
so we've teased you enough why is a tunnel joining the railway and the canal here at the summit
of both now the shot we gave you then wasn't great across the field so let's look from above
and you can clearly now see what we could see but from above
let's plot those on a map from above again for context and maybe join them up with the predicted
line of the tunnel or the heading itself now when the Canal builders eventually started to
consider water that a number of Springs in the area to use one of them was Bull born water or
bourbon head this was great for the canal but then come the railway so come the 1830s and the
very start of Railway Mania they had the same desire to connect parts of the country and move
people and goods and here we are on the London and Birmingham Railway right above it now it used to
be two tracks where it started in 1837 and they had the same problem as the canal they had this
problem of the height here at tring and I did the same thing as the Canal builders in fact I think
they even employed one of the contractors who had worked on a canal in Birmingham
and here comes joint and uh instead of building a thousand meter long
uh cutting well the railway decided to build a 4 000 meter long cutting
the depth of the Railway cutting here was immense and subsequently the railway was taking in more
water now than the canal a solution was needed and that was to drive headings into the side
of the Railway cutting at least one of those headings reached and drained directly into the
canal problem solved so now bulbourne head or bulb on water flows back into the canal albeit taking
quite a long detail down some of the Railway gullies into the heading and back into the canal
ah you'll notice either side of the Railway has yet more steeper embankments probably about 10
meters further back probably don't need to tell you where the Earth came from for that but it's
all around it there's lows in that field there it's almost like Spore heaps but from the cutting
one more thing to show you before we close off on this little video
and there's just up there in the trees as we head back down to the station car park
whoa hold on a second where are you taking us I'm taking us to see Grims ditch it's a two and
a half thousand year old earthwork how exciting is that that is exciting but was that got to do with
what I've actually been doing already absolutely nothing but it was in the area I thought I thought
it might be quite fun to go and see it maybe another video you've got a good point because
Grims did travels across the whole of south of England in part and there's a big story to tell
so maybe you're right maybe we should tell that and say that for a different day sorry about
that people we're going to cut this on short hope you've enjoyed the video that we've done about the
tring cuttings and the canal and the railway and how they were linked by a mystery tunnel
more of the same this time next week