Water source: canal and river exploration

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. This post sees our family dreaming up two winter projects to help us explore the world and get to know two river routes out of London. Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).  

New River appears at Clissold Park - here it is allowed to be an area for dogs to splash around.

This blog has done it: it's just gone over 25,000 views. This year it's also included our efforts to finish off the Hadrian's Wall walk, and the Capital Ring which encircles London. Great achievements... but I had a restless feeling that we needed another family project.  Strangely after a few months struggling to think what to do, two plans burst into mind which will keep us occupied and offer fascinating contrasts. 

Find this in Finsbury Park.

The plan is to walk the New River - which is famously neither new, nor a river - but a canal that brings water up to London from Hertfordshire. Its source is Ware, not so far from where I grew up, and  the route ends up  Sadler's Wells, Islington not so far from where I live now. Amazingly the New River was completed in 1613, nearly 400 years ago (anniversary in 2013) but it now brings water to the East and West Reservoirs on the edge of Green Lanes, Hackney - from there the water for London either goes into a massive great pipe called the London Ring, or looks set to be doing this. I only found out this thing existed when we looked at plans of our house when we were buying it and saw that there was a huge tunnel that wasn't a tube marked as crossing under our cellar some 30m, maybe 50m down. A journey down the New River has to take us via the world's biggest canals - Suez, Panama and the Grand Canal of China. There are loads more which I hope to discover things about during our time plodding along beside the New River.

We also intend to walk from the sea to the source of The River Thames - an exploration made possible by the fact that this is a very well-trod long distance path with an extremely tidy ending: a pub and station at Kemble just a couple of fields from the spring that is the surprisingly unspectacular source of this great river. This journey will give us the chance to replicate some of the amazing explorers' journeys to find the Nile, the Congo, the Amazon etc. Here's hoping.

is there a river or canal near you that you could explore? If so, do join in with your own river trip. Let me know how you go - or what are the best parts of river exploration.

Here is another post I've written about river exploration.
http://aroundbritainnoplane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/journey-to-end-of-nile.html

Journey to the end of the Nile

In Highgate Cemetery, a homage to lost explorers?

I quite like feeling slightly lost. Not lost, late, out of supplies, with malaria and without a map like the explorers desperate to track the Nile or the Congo to its source. I mean lost on a bike knowing I'm only a couple of streets off my target, but probably discovering new routes there's always the hope I'll find a quicker or more interesting journey. And now I like looking for rivers.

Not long ago I posted on my homemadekids blog the National Trust's list of 50 things you should have done before you are 12. See it here. On the list was dam a stream. Now I've done this before, and so have my kids (and we unblocked it when the game stopped, don't worry), but I've never spent that long messing around in a stream. Until today. 

Atmospheric ivy.

Knowing the long summer holidays are ahead I've been trying to do a day volunteering (rather than writing) most weeks this term - generally something that builds up my skills, like my turn on the Sunday rota at the local canoe club; or conservation tasks at an overgrown cemetery (see pix). These are about the only child-free things I do. Generally I find it means that I bring home tidbits about the big world outside, and often inspire my kids to have a go at what I'm doing too.

Here it is, the source of the Fleet cleaned up.

But today I'm back from a happy day in the woods, covered in mud, after tracking and digging out the source of the River Fleet. This is a very famous river in London - Fleet Street is where the newspapers used to all be produced.

Looking at Wikipedia I'm slightly doubtful about whether I really was looking at the Fleet or not - it definitely ends up subterranean, but the info isn't consistent. One to think about. But a good river source isn't always obvious. Take the Thames.

I asked Nell, 11,  if she remembered our efforts to find the source of the Thames in Gloucestershire in 2009. Amazingly she did. It seems to have had the same sort of memory impact as the Moon landings did for her dad. "Yes, I've found a river. I found the Thames. It didn't have water in it. It just looked like a stream, and then a small ditch but there were cows grazing by it. There was a small stone saying this is the mouth of the Thames. if I'd been there first I'd have put a really big stone and in really clear writing I'd have written 'this is where the famous river Thames starts' and then I'd put the date."

The trickle that turns into the Fleet River starts here.

In contrast I just crossed my fingers that unblocking the Fleet, so it now has a clear route between the graves, wouldn't lead to flooding downstream. Or Mr Child's grave on the right sinking into a deep Fleet pool.  

All quiet so far (nearly a week on).

I wonder if Livingstone enjoyed finding the Nile? Not quite sure at what point you celebrate these things - locating it, getting back to camp or when the general public know what's happened. I just know that I grinned the whole cycle journey home (despite being slightly lost)...

Picnic time in the Dales

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola (pic is of Nell, Anna and Lola looking for fossils)

We're staying in Kettlewell, a tourist honeypot in the Dales well-known thanks to the film Calendar Girls, and are lucky enough to be guided by a friend, Anna, around Wharfedale and over to Gordale Scar and Malham Cove. I've wanted to see these two dramatic cliffs - the first made famous by James Ward's painting of the same name (see it in the Tate) and the second by Pete's tales from his geography field trip 30 years ago.

There's a field studies centre above Malham Tarn which boasts the highest manned weather station in the UK. Readings are taken from the Campbell-Stokes sun recorder, the Stevenson screen (looks like a long-legged bee hive) and a rain guage at 9am GMT every day of the year. It's also a good place to get field guides to the hay meadows which at this time of the year are crammed with wild flowers. We tick off buttercup, sorrel, bistort and pignut amongst the gently waving grasses. The air feels tingly clean, the curlews are calling and birds start up from the meadows - larks, wheatear and finches. It's all very beautiful and old-fashioned. Predictably Lola and Nell put in a request for ice-cream, soon.

Malham Cove was carved into the Craven Fault by an enormous waterfall. It's long gone but irresistably reminds the adults in our party of the water that pours over Victoria Falls. Anna has recently been on the Zambia side of this (its on the border with Zimbabwe) and flew around the falls in a microlight. She shows us photos of her doing a loop above "the smoke that thunders" in a vehicle that looks like a bicycle with a lawnmower engine.

Later we picnic above Malham Cove - not far from the site where a pair of peregrines have again successfully bred two chicks - surrounded by the happy yellows of eggs & bacon (meadow vetchling), delicate wild panises and hawkbit. After lunch we pad over wild thyme to look for fossils in the limestone walls. Nell finds it hard to believe this area used to be under the sea (millions of years ago), but once you pick through the heavy pale and grey stones looking for traces of fins and leaves, shells and coral stems it's hard not to view the National Park's classic stone walls as old lumps of dead coral that you sometimes see "decorating" aquariums.

To round off the day we get locally-made ice cream and then I take the girls fishing on the shallow beach under the bridge - a spot on the River Wharfe recommended by the lovely shopkeeper in Kettlewell. We don't think about climate change at all until the rain starts. Twenty-four hours on it's still beating down and the weather reports another three days of low pressure wets. You'd think the girls had done a secret raindance on their fishing trip... but they promise me they were only gone to practise bubblegum blowing...