Canal Camps - A Variety of Work

No two canal work-sites are ever exactly the same - every canal had its own distinctive features, and used whatever building materials were available to hand. Combine this with the many different jobs involved in restoring a canal, and you will find that Canal Camps offer a wide variety of different types of work. Here are a few things you may find yourself doing on a Canal Camp.

Starting with what's usually the very first step towards rescuing a canal from decay:

‘Scrub-bashing’: our name for the vegetation-clearance needed when a canal has been abandoned for a few decades. Bushes, nettles and sometimes even some quite large trees may have to be removed using bow-saws, loppers and strimmers as the first stage of restoration. The need to avoid the nesting season makes this ideal winter work - as does the chance of some bonfires to keep warm! If cutting trees down and burning them sounds like an odd kind of conservation work, we should point out that only the ones in the actual channel are removed - canal restorers do their best to preserve the nature interest of the waterways. Indeed, restoring a canal is often a good way of promoting the eco-diversity of the area.

Once the ‘scrub-bashing’ is complete, we can move onto clearing out the tons of silt that accumulate in the bottoms of old canals. And these days that usually means...

Machinery: many people still call what we do ‘canal digging’. But nowadays when we need to dig out the channel, we rarely do it by hand with picks and shovels - we use excavators and dumper-trucks instead. We don’t just let anyone start driving a JCB - we run our own training and authorisation scheme. But there’s no reason why a new volunteer shouldn’t learn to use machinery on their first camp - subject to the age limits set by the law and our insurance. And we use a variety of other machinery on our work sites - concrete-mixers and stone-cutters for example...

...especially when we’ve completed the clearance and are on to the...

Restoration work: a lot of what we do on Canal Camps is centred on the locks, bridges, weirs, wharves and other structures that are a feature of the canals. Most of these date back to when the canal was originally built - maybe 200 years ago - and are now showing their age, and suffering from years of neglect. Restoring them may mean sympathetically patching the lock walls with original bricks, or dismantling collapsing stonework having carefully numbered all the stones so that they can be put back together in the right order. Or it might mean knocking the whole lot down with a sledgehammer and rebuilding it from the bottom up - often with modern materials such as reinforced concrete hidden behind the more traditional brick and stone. So on the same Canal Camp you may well get the chance to try you hand at both traditional canal-builders’ skills and modern construction techniques. And when the restoration work’s finished, the locks and bridges will look just the same as they did when they were built, but be good for the next few centuries of use, once the canal’s been re-opened and boats have started using it again.

And having reopened it for boats, that doesn’t necessarily mean the canal’s seen its last Canal Camp - one day it might just be the site for one of our...

Festival Camps: one of this year’s Camps isn’t directly concerned with canal restoration at all: the Inland Waterways Association’s National Waterways Festival is a major event attracting hundreds of boats and thousands of visitors, and takes place over the August Bank Holiday weekend in a different place each year - this year in Beale Park on the River Thames in Berkshire. At events like this, our volunteers help to set out the site beforehand - the marquees, stalls, arenas, fencing, boat moorings and so on, then help to run the festival itself, then take it all down again afterwards.