News Desk: Tel: 01380 840584 Email: news@kanaltimes.co.uk
The KAcanalTimes is the online magazine for everyone interested in canals —and in particular the Kennet & Avon Canal and its neighbouring waterways in the south of England — with comprehensive tourist information, canal history, walks, eating out and
whats-on — and up to the minute news coverage
Features
The natural world
Canal lives
The K&A Canal’s lost Wharves
The Water Shrew
Ann of the Marsh
Honeystreet Wharf
An American researcher came across an ancient horse brass from the Kennet & Avon Canal with a woman’s name on it.
A woman’s name on a horsebrass from 1822 was unheard of in his experience and it set
Rolf Augustin off on a trail that uncovered the fascinating story of a family
of canalside traders.
It chronicles the life of the business from its start, its rise to prosperity
and then its eventual decline and closure — a story that parrallels the trading history of the canal itself.
This is the first of three features in which Rolf Augustin tells the story of
the Newth family on the K&A Canal.
The casual observer would be forgiven for regarding it as one of the cutest
denizens of the canal bank with its long pointed snout and white tufted ears — but Susan Litherland of the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust paints a differnet picture
of this tough little fighter.
The rise and decline of this important K&A Wharf is chronicled by Di Harris
Jones’s Mill nature reserve
The Wiltshire Wildlife Trust canalside nature reserve at Jones’s Mill near Pewsey was once a managed water meadow. It is now home to rare flora
and fauna — as well as a herd of Belted Galloway cattle. Susan Litherland of the Wiltshire
Wildlife Trust takes us into a lost world.
Treasures of the towpath
Rolf Augustin looks at the horse brasses which along with the colourful roses
and castles that adorned the working narrowboats brought colour to the cut
They were forged of brass, yet prized as gold. They gleamed wherever the eye
could see. To the narrowboat families that plied the inland waterways in the tow-horse days
of yesteryear, they were lovingly known as “bright bits”. Along with the colourful roses and castles, lace plates and Measham teapot that
adorned each tiny cabin, bright bits proclaimed the proud independence and
enduring self-reliance that so defined the closely knit boat community.
Top of page►►
