‘There is something indescribably forlorn about these abandoned waterways; like old ruined houses or silent mills, they are haunted by the bygone life and toil which has left its deathless, eloquent mark upon them. Just as in old houses the worn steps are the memorial of many vanished feet, so on the canals it is the grooves worn by the towing-lines in the rotting lockbeams or the crumbling brickwork of bridges that bring the past to life.
Most beautiful and most tragic of all is the old Thames and Severn Canal, climbing up the Golden Valley between great hills that wear their beechwoods like a mane. At the summit at Sapperton it pierces the spine of the Cotswold scarp by a tunnel two and a quarter miles in length, and thereafter winds cross the open wolds to join the young Thames at Inlgesham above Lechlade. At Daneway, a tiny village clinging to the steep slope by the western portal of the tunnel, there is an old inn of Cotswold stone where they still remember the boats. The wide windows under their carved drip-stones have seen them moored in what is now a grassy hollow, and they have watched the smoke of cabin fires soar upwards on still evenings against the dark background of the hanging beechwoods. The ‘Flower of Gloster’ was one of the last boats to travel from the Severn to the Thames by this route, and I shall never cease to envy Mr. Temple Thurston his good fortune. Perhaps it is because I have a particular regard for the Cotswold country that I regret most the passing of this, the only Cotswold canal.’