Notes

We are looking forward to stepping into a pub like this one again soon. Sunday lunch and a pint! Photo was taken in Rotherwick very recently.

This is the simplest note with just the two frontmatter fields of date and syndicate = true. If you see this as a tweet, I will be deleting it, don’t respond!

St Mary's Church - Old Basing

A lovely walk this evening around Old Basing but a very brief one as the weather took a dip. We had a little walk around the church of St Mary’s.

Basingstoke Canal - Discovering the lost canal section

It’s fascinating what you learn as you begin digging deep into the history of a place. Clearly there are some places I have just got to go in search of.

I know the area of the canal from Odiham Castle up to the Greywell Tunnel very well indeed. I’ve known it since I was a teenager. The section I’ve never visited though has been what lies to the west of it.

This looks useful, a set of circular walks along the entire canal but the one that interests me most of all is Greywell Hill Park which incorporates various interesting spots.

OS Maps 2 mile route around Up Nately and the canal

# What3words

///drilled.unscathed.farm

I like this name because we are looking for a tunnel and it cuts underneath farmland and thus on the surface it remains unscathed!!

Archive library

• Wikipedia and the Greywell Tunnel

• Bat conservation trust

• The last five miles

  • There has for a long time been an ambition to restore the last 5 miles but as you can imagine this would now be close to impossible
  • Tunnel can’t be restored, due to it’s SSI status
  • 300 meter section collapsed
  • Basingstoke Wharf is now (amongst many things) Festival Place
  • Plans to establish a footpath and cycleway that follows closely the old route taken by the canal
  • Take a look at the London Canals website, as they may still have information on on the last 5 miles, a pictorial guide
  • National Library of Scotland
  • Canal Ring
  • Kennet and Avon Link

• Subterranean Britain

• Little Tunnel Bridge

  • The last boat to travel all the way to Basingstoke Wharf was thought to be February 1914 which had taken 4 months to ship its cargo of sand from Ash Vale. It had become very hard to navigate.

• Historic England

• Greywell Tunnel Photos

• Youtube - The Bald Explorer

  • Whitewater River runs underneath canal, not through or into it
  • Part of the tunnel collapsed
  • Aldershot training army, boats etc
  • Anti aircraft guns were moved along the canal during the War to help stop many of the bombers reach London
  • 1794 canal was opened and originally would have been snaked around to Rotherwick and then Tylney Hall Estate
    • INstead routed through Greywell Hill
  • Ran until 1930s and was closed due to tunnel collapse and was not making a profit
  • The non-canal part is SSI
  • MEets Wey at Weybridge and not far from Thames
  • Agricultural, timber shipping
  • Tunnel 1300 yards long
  • Tunnel entrance Victorian
  • Largest colony of bats in the UK
  • Tunnel lasted for 140 years until 1930s when the collapse happened
  • They did show the other end of the tunnel but must have skipped a bit?
  • Who was the local guide chappy?

• Youtube - Paul and Rebecca Whitewick

  • Matt their local guide
  • Steep cutting embankment
  • Looking for small bridge
  • Brick Kiln bridge with its two different parapets.
    • Historic England
    • The Knaphillian - the history of the brick kilns that made most of the building materials for the construction of the canal bridges and locks
    • Basingstoke and Deane
  • Basingstoke canal logbook, what’s that?
  • Up Nateley nature reserve, there is another secton of the canal I think?

• Youtube - Adrian Oates

  • A very nice watch!

Can we find the opposite portal into the tunnel at Greywell and evidence of the part long defunct?

Friendless Churches

My favourite Twitter accounts, especially those with a stronger purpose than my own, are those that tell great stories. Friendless Churches are a charity who help restore the places of worship that no longer see many people, let alone hold services of any kind. They are well worth a follow, regardless of whether you make a donation or not. You may learn about somewhere not so far from you that you had never heard of before.

One of many great stories from Friendless Churches

Double bridge near Kingsworthy

This bridge looks superb and I wouldn’t mind adding it to one of our photographic rambles at some point. If you haven’t come across Paul and Rebecca Whitewick’s channel, it is well worth watching.

See Paul’s original tweet

Kate has long kept many of us entertained with her fantastic streamed nestbox camera views of various birds. This owl is just gorgeous!

I had totally forgotten that in order to apply tags in Eleventy, they must be in an array, like this…

---
tags: ['one', 'two']
---

Silly me!

@SlowWaysUK eager to get involved as soon as or not long after you launch. In the meantime we are following our own favourite paths between one place and another.

Easter Sunday stroll

Today we felt like getting out and enjoying the nice weather, so started off with a stroll around Farnborough. Someone had put up some giant inflatable Easter bunnies!

Something of a documentary photo that I wanted to take for our local interest, which shows a part of the town called Kingsmead for those who don’t live here. It’s all closed right now and recently some new planters have been put in place containing an assortment of flowers looked after by a local group. The sign in the background caught my eye from a photographers point of view. Am I being watched?!

All of the photos in this set were taken with my Sony A7R3 but what I now do more often than not is import my photos into my iPad Pro using a USB dongle. I used Darkroom on my iPad to carry out the edits. I started off using one of the filters in Darkroom that emulate XPRO film, which delivers this very punchy look.

The building in the photo is Farnborough Leisure Centre, that closed for the Lockdown and recently we have learnt it won’t reopen. The local council are in the throes of planning a massive redevelopment for this part of the town. We could be without this facility for 5 years. It has caused a lot of upset amongst it’s members, which includes myself and wife Tina.

I am documenting the changes around the town, so this photo counts towards that.

I miss city bicycle photos, places like Oxford, London and wot-not. The strong contrasty light worked well here because the colour palette is very nicely simplified by it and evokes a graphical sensibility.