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NEWSLETTER |
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2001
started so well. After ten weeks of courses Hege and I finally
mastered web design enabling us to tinker with our web-site
daily, giving up-to-date availability and news flashes. Hege was
accepted by all the three universities to which she applied (to
study Archeology as a mature student). Daughter Anna got a place at
the Royal College of Art and I was invited to exhibit my chairs at a
prestigious sculpture exhibition at Quennington. Bookings and
enquiries were coming in at an unprecedented rate.
Then
“foot & mouth” struck. Overnight enquiries came to a dead
halt. Cancellations, mostly from abroad, began to hit us. One family
in Australia cancelled because they feared their children might
become infected. Slowly, to our surprise, all the cancelled weeks
began to fill. We are now back to our usual 95% occupancy.
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Except
for Saturday, which is change-over day, I have spent much of the
year creating a formal lily pond.
The children decided that it was really meant to be a
swimming pool. That soon changed when I introduced two Sterlets,
large but harmless ugly bottom feeding catfish, that are particularly
partial to children’s toes. After that I have constructed a formal
garden based on a Persian rug design. The centre piece is a light
house warning the world at large that life at Westley Farm is still
vibrant and outward-looking.
“But
there are no ships in the valley”, says Tom with impeccable logic.
“Wait for the rise in sea level with global warming” adds Hege.
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| The canal at Chalford
circa 1920 |
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“Why do we have to have ships to justify
building a light-
house?” say I. Do we have to be nationalists to appreciate the
beauty of the fluttering Union Jack? Do we have to be Christians to
want to build a church? In all seriousness it
does seem unlikely that the QE2 will ever sail up the Chalford
valley. |
However
there is a real possibility of pleasure boats on the Thames and Severn Canal. Those
of you who have been here
will know that romantic derelict ex-waterway at the bottom of the
farm which formerly brought
coal from the Forest of Dean, first to Stroud in 1783 and later to
Brimscombe, Chalford and Lechlade
(1789).
82 million pounds of Lottery and Euro-money is to be spent
restoring it, so that within a decade boats should be seen once
again traveling from Bristol to Oxford. It was last used in 1927.
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| The
Sapperton tunnel was in its time the longest man-made tunnel in the
world at
just over two miles.Joseph Priestley (remember he is the guy
who first discovered water was made up of two separate gases)
described it: “The famous tunnel at Sapperton …..is of hard
rock, some of it so solid as to need no masonry to support it, other
parts are arched above and have inverted arches in the bottom” |
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| "Pile
them high and sell it cheap" |
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| Many
navvies lost their lives during its five year construction. Half a
mile of tunnel has now collapsed and will require sophisticated
civil engineering to make good. Bargees would hire “leggers” at
the Daneway pub to lie on their backs on top of the barges and push
against the tunnel roof to power the barge through to Tunnel House
at Coates. |
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| Bakers
Mill |
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The
canal was formally abandoned by act of parliament in the 1950’s
and much of it sold into private ownership. It will require powers
of compulsory purchase to buy it back. “Over my dead body” says
our neighbour, Martin Neville who, not only owns a mile of the canal
bed below us, but also the lake at Bakers Mill which was specially
enlarged as a reservoir to top up the leaky waterway.
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The
original Boulton & Watt engine, which helped to raise water to
the high point beyond Cirencester, is long gone. In 1789 steam
engines were in their infancy replacing the cumbersome old Newcomen
engine. Technology marches on. Human muscle is replaced with
heavy machinery, puddling with neoprene and steam engines with more
efficient turbines.
Progress
is inevitable. In the heated debate between the diehard
conservationists who, by blocking progress, believe they can freeze
nature are, in my view, misguided. Beauty is fickle. Beauty is
transient. Beauty is nature's work nourished by the breath of caring humanity, in
conflict with the brutal forces of change that are thrust upon us by the
unprecedented expansion of the human species.
Julian
Usborne August 2001
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