Peter Stockdale wrote: > Sorry, for Western -please read Eastern ! Phew, I was just wondering how that amount of back-pumping could be achieved! Alternatively the longest balanced pipe in the world might also do the job ;-)
David/Peter/Martin thanks all for the information, though in a sense I wish I'd not asked. It truly does make depressing reading, particularly the stuff about restrictions on boat movements and bow-hauling through sections. One of my repeated thoughts when travelling down to Maesbury last week was how can this tiny strip of land be so restricted when a few yards away farmers are using heavy machinery to plough up massive fields every few months with no restrictions at all and no doubt using bucket loads of chemicals to kill plants and animals in the process. To have remarkable historical engineering feats like Vyrnwy Aqueduct all but ignored especially at a time when our domestic tourist industry needs every bit of help it can get for the sake of "protecting" species that have only arrived there in the years since the canal closed (and therefore can not even reasonably argued to be "from" that area) seems nonsensical. It strikes me that we need to learn from an environmental lobby who seem to be far more adept at getting their point across than we are. The total amount of land "lost" by total restoration of the canal would by my very rough calculation be about 150 acres or 0.006% of the land area of the counties of Shropshire and Powys combined. If that's not a reasonable trade-off for tens of thousand extra visitors I don't know what is... Rant over Steve NB Bream
