This is 'Good King John II' back for his final week.
So we are now fully retired and living down on the River Arun in a small village called Bury. Very near to the seaside with all its attractions. But we have come down from a village at 600 ft in Surrey to more or less sea level in Sussex, and this winter the floods were almost too close for comfort.
Quite a coincidence really as I have spent over 10 years of my retirement so far working for the Wey & Arun Canal Trust (WACT) living up at the Northern end of the canal and now we are down at the Southern end.
The story of the Wey and Arun canal comes in “threes”. In 1815 it took 300 Irish Navigators (navvies) 3 years to build a 30 mile long canal, (and that with just shovels and wheelbarrows). Today WACT has just about 3,000 members who have been working for about 33 years and we have completed 3 miles of navigable canal !!!
It is often called London’s lost route to the sea. It was originally designed to bring war materiel and bullion from the Woolwich Arsenal up the Thames to Weybridge down the Wey Navigation (opened in 1651!) to near Godalming, down the new Wey and Arun Junction canal to near Pulborough and down the River Arun to the sea at Littlehampton or across the canal link at Ford over to Chichester Harbour. Thence to carry all the materiel to our English soldiers fighting Napoleon in France. A more direct and safer route avoiding the Goodwins, the Kent foreshore and French privateers in the Channel.
The sad thing for the canal was that Waterloo happened in 1815 just about when the canal opened so its raison d’etre disappeared in its first year of operation ! And WACT is trying to rebuild and reopen it. There are many many challenges today like a pair of lock gates costing about £25,000! But we press on.
Well it has been a pleasure serving you for the past 5 weeks and so many thanks go to Gen2 for steering me through the intricacies of cutting and pasting etc etc.
Good luck to you all and next week I will be happy to join you again in guessing the links!