Britain’s biggest canal charity has issued an SOS after finding itself between a lock and a hard place.
The Canal & River Trust is on the hunt of volunteers to help maintain some of the most spectacular waterways in the world.
Be wary of this good cause. Making an old canal navigable again isn’t necessarily good for the aquatic wildlife, or the bats in the tunnels.
Volunteering to make canals navigable for narrowboats …… what next, repairing potholes in my street?
Actually, the FixMyStreet app works fairly well for Bristol as they do get fixed.
Tend to agree with Johns comment about canals, the M1 of canals (Grand union) through Milton Keynes gets very large numbers of boat movements and constantly churned up, no chance for aquatic plants apart from a few odd pockets. Although there are some narrow stips of edge out of the main waterway and out of the heavily trafficed towpath. If canals abandoned completely and loose water then they might be turned back to farmland or some other habitat.
Me too. There are a number of disused canals (Stroudwater, Thames and Severn, North Wilts, Wilts and Berks, Hereford and Gloucester) in my region, all of which are subject to ‘restoration’ projects which are of far more benefit to narrow boat users/tourism interests than wildlife. Even the restoration is inauthentic- concrete and metal girders deployed to shore up the banking in place of the more ego-friendly- and traditional - clay puddling. Not much use to water voles, to give one example of a species once very frequently found there upon when I was a boy and latterly in sore need of an anthropogenic ‘helping hand’. As Mike points out and judging by Canal Trust work hereabouts, botanical species suffer. So do amphibians. Where presently there are fairly regularly occurring, small sections infilled either side which still hold water and are effectively, fish-free ponds, reopening whole canal systems encourages piscine colonisation to amphibian detriment.
“ego-friendly”! ECO-friendly I meant
possibly freudian slip! if big engineering is what they want to do really.
Interesting - in the last few days we have been seeing flotillas of narrow boats on the Thames at Limehouse Reach all carrying flags and messages - sorry I never photographed them - they joined the river through the lock at Limehouse.
eco friendly - found this recent bit in the Evening Standard
Have been thinking about potholes - and wondering about the cars that now use roads that were designed for lighter cars.
Googled this:
Greg Knight, a Conservative MP, last year asked the UK government to test “the adequacy of the strength of multistorey car parks and bridges at safely bearing the additional weight of electric vehicles”.
The Asphalt Industry Alliance has claimed that smaller roads could be vulnerable to increased pothole formation, and the Daily Mail wrote: “Multistorey car parks could be at risk of collapsing.”
The science
Electric cars can be very heavy. Car magazine said General Motors’ gargantuan Hummer “manages to look even heavier than it is” – an impressive achievement, considering it comes in at more than four tonnes. A third of that is the battery pack capable of powering one of the biggest cars over 300 miles. It is big.
Then there are the Chelsea Tractors that are so very popular for the school run - so convenient for dropping off outside the schools. - Just my opinion.
And if these vehicles are heavier - have the tyre manufacturers allowed for the extra wear and tear? And could this leave leave bits of minute tyre shreds on the roads for passing pedestirans to inhale?
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