The Wessex Tour – sort of! Day eight

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The great advantage of this campsite is the access out of the gate onto the Avon and Kennet Canal. We opt to head eastwards so we can go explore the vast eleven Caen Hill Locks.

Each lock has its own side pool area to help store sufficient water. It is an extraordinary Victorian engineering feat by John Rennie. At the top, we stop at the little café and sit outside to consume coffee, bacon roll and breakfast pastry whilst looking down the locks. We are surprised to see that two barges can fit into each lock alongside each other. Having stopped to explore them on the way up, we would never have said they were that wide enough.

Refortified, we head back down the locks westward over to the marina at Hilperton. At the foot of the locks, we admire the clever electronic display which shows how much solar power has been used to pump the water back up to the top basins. It measures it across the year – how much energy has been used and how much CO2 has been saved by using the solar panels power. The solar panels are found in neighbouring fields.

 We pass huge herons motionless at the bankside, standing in the reeds, their gaze unwaveringly focused on the shallow margins. A swan stands in the middle of the tow path and delays our progress westwards for a few minutes. Swans are very big and it is unnerving having to sneak past one with less than a metre separating us and the big bird.

The track is gravel, bumpy in places but easy work on E Bikes.  We pass bankside ‘winter mooring’ barge communities. Most were gathered on the bank alongside their barge doing maintenance on various bits of barge equipment. Some had small fires going in old washing machine drums. An enterprising few had moved their boat wood stoves outside. Frozen breath lingered in the cold air but the smiles and greetings were cheerful enough.

For some of the way, coots and moorhens would dart alongside us, bobbing in and out of the bulrushes.

 Where the canal went under the A363, we left the tow path, headed up onto the road and turned left to visit the small marina pub where we stopped for hot chocolates.

Deciding that road cycling would be noisy and fraught back through Trowbridge, we opted to return to the campsite back along the canal, retracing our original route.

Postscript:

I have been out trying to grab a few more photographs of Orion and M45 Pleiades. It is freezing and I managed to once again position the tripod in a way that I could sit in the cab and look out of the front window. Didn’t get to see the promised northern lights though. The horizon at the campsite just isn’t low enough in the northern direction. 

 Total route distance cycled today: 26 miles