[email protected] wrote: > 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.
In a way, it's precisely because they've been doing this to so much of the surrounding land that the canal is seen as being so deserving of having its nature interest preserved. Because it's the only strip of land that hasn't suffered in this way. > 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. The trouble is, the habitats that those species used to occupy have in many places disappeared. It would have been good if the conservationists had done something to prevent this happening, rather than waiting until derelict canals are the only places left for these plants to thrive, but that's where we're at. 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. This is true, but right now I feel our best chance of seeing any restoration and reopening at all is in coming to a compromise with them, as per the Conservation Management Plan which was (finally after a lot of wrangling) signed by all the interested groups a couple of years ago. Sure, it's not perfect. Yes, of course I'd like to see unrestricted navigation of a complete restored Montgomery Canal. And I resent the relatively recent arrival on the scene of the nature interests when it was waterways supporters who had ensured that parts of the canal were still there at all. But given the deadlock we were in a few years ago, with nature interests trying to insist on limits as low as 250 boat movements per year and potential funders refusing to support restoration on the grounds that such meagre traffic wouldn't provide any regeneration benefits, I think the eventual CMP limits (2500 bm/y on the Welsh part, no limit on the English if I remember rightly) are probably the best we can hope for in the circumstances. > 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. But compare it to the total wetland area of those counties, and it's probably a much bigger proportion. Once again, it's not something that I'm happy about - but until we can persuade those farmers or other landowners to reinstate the marsh, fen, ponds etc that have disappeared, it's going to be difficult to fight it. So for now I'll go with spending my holidays digging ponds by the canal for weeds to live in, because the alternative seems to be no more restoration at all. Martin
