Novelists, Poets and the Thames and Severn Canal and the River Thames
(Referenced by David Viner)
Crotchet Castle by Thomas Peacock 1831
‘Leaving Lechlade, they entered the canal that connects the Thames with the Severn; ascended by many locks; passed by a tunnel, three miles long, through the bowels of Sapperton Hill; agreed unanimously that the greatest pleasure derivable from visiting any cavern of any sort was that of getting out of it; descended by many locks again through the valley of Stroud into the Severn … ‘
A few local lines taken from The Genius of the Thames by Thomas Peacock
Where Kemble’s wood-embosomed spire
Adorns the solitary glade,
And ancient trees, in green attire,
Diffuse a deep and pleasant shade,
Thy bounteous urn, light-murmuring, flings
The treasures of its infant springs,
And fast, beneath its native hill,
Impels the silver-sparkling rill,
With flag-flowers fringed and whispering reeds,
Along the many-colored meads.
Thames! when, beside thy secret source
Remembrance points the mighty course
Thy defluent waters keep;
Advancing, with perpetual flow,
Through banks still widening as they go,
To mingle with the deep …
Flow proudly, Thames! the emblem bright
And witness of succeeding years!
Flow on, in freedom’s sacred light,
Nor stained with blood, nor swelled with tears.
Sweet is thy course, and clear, and still,
By Ewan’s old neglected mill:
Green shores thy narrow stream confine,
Where blooms the modest eglantine,
And hawthorn-boughs o’ershadowing spread,
To canopy thy infant bed.
Now peaceful hamlets wandering through,
And fields in beauty ever new,
Where Lechlade sees thy current strong
First waft the unlaboring bark along;
Thy copious waters hold their way
Tow’rds Radcote’s arches, old and grey,
Hornblower and the Atropos C.S.Forester 1953
Forester’s 1953 book opens with a description of first class travel on a ‘queer craft, fully seventy feet long … hardly five feet in beam … draught less than a foot’ through the Golden Valley: ‘The rhythmic sound of the hoofs of the cantering horses … the boat itself made hardly a sound … the reeds at the banks bowing and straightening again long after they had gone by … The cantering horses maintained their nine miles an hour, being changed every half an hour.’
Hornblower takes the boat through the locks to the summit of the Thames and Severn Canal, and so to ‘the marvel of the age’: Sapperton Tunnel. And here they found ‘the strangest sort of mesmeric nightmare, suspended in utter blackness, utterly silent’, until Hornblower became ‘aware of a slight noise in the distance’, a ‘low muttering sound, at first so feeble’, but it ‘gradually increased in volume as the boat crept along, until it was a loud roaring … An underground spring here broke through the roof and tumbled roaring into the canal … in deafening cataracts. It thundered upon the roofs of the cabins …Then the torrent eased, fell away to trickles, and then they were past it.’
Their progress continued until, ‘in that massive darkness … a minute something, the size apparently of a grain of sand …The tunnel opening grew in size, from a grain of sand to a pea … assumed the crescent size expected … grew larger still, and with its growth the light increased … by infinitesimal gradations, until Hornblower could see the dark surface of the water, the irregularities of the tunnel roof … brick-lined again …’