the 2025 Kennet and Avon Canal calendar

The new calendar is here!

This year I've gone back to people on the canal; so there's incidents from daily life and history, like the workboats - here's John Knill in 1950, delivering a cargo to Newbury; and Ishtar, keeping boaters supplied with coal last winter; and the CRT paddle boat, dashing off to clear vegetation in the Long Pound. And a couple of cross-section pictures, which are always a fun look at boatlife on the inside. A few anthropomorphic rats have sneaked in, too. What else? Crofton pumping station, the Aldermaston tea shop, Tyle Mill and the Mikron Theatre boat...

You can get one from my Etsy shop, or Devizes Books; or directly from me if you can find my boat, which will be easy at the end of this month because there's the big floating Christmas fair in Bradford on Avon, on 30 Nov-1 Dec.

cross-section of a narrowboat

Another picture for the calendar. This is a cross-section of a narrowboat, chugging along the Vale of Pewsey with Woodborough Hill in the background. That's a Russell Newbery engine, sort of, beacuse it's a bit more picturesque than my Beta Tug engine. And the boatperson's cabin is rather more ideal than my own cluttered and squalid one. Art, see.

I think that makes nine pics I've got now. And as people usually demand at least twelve months in their calendars, I'd really better pull my finger out, hadn't I? Anyway, it was fun to draw this one. Particularly fun, that is. If it weren't fun, I wouldn't be doing it, after all.

watching out for redwings

It's been a few weeks since I last saw a swallow. I've been watching out for the redwings and fieldfares that come down from Scandinavia for the winter; I'd wondered if the easterly gales we had a week or so ago would blow some over, but I've seen nothing till this morning.

And now the hawthorns all along the towpath are busy with them. Very flighty, though; walk as quietly as I may, they'll dash off to a different tree, constantly on the move, like actors in a bedroom farce.

Goldfinches are busy in the ash tree and the umbillifers in the field across the water.

I'm trying to get on with the pictures for the calendar, in between boat maintenance work, getting Eve ready for the winter. And wandering out to admire the latest autumnal thing, of course.

rough winds

Late summer up on the Long Pound has morphed into autumn, with some lively gales stirring up the canal and turning the hard-baked towpath back to mud. It's getting time to be dropping down through Devizes and into the Shire, where the gales don't blow quite so harshly and they offer the occasional blown-down tree as compensation; as long as they don't land on your boat, they can be a welcome source of firewood.

This was quite the sunrise, though. And an hour later it was just a memory and the sky turned grey and the rain set in again. And I lit the stove to get the ache out of my shoulders.

a map of Wiltshire

I'd been intending for ages to do a map of Wiltshire. And now I have. Took ruddy ages, I must say.

Lots of historic things, like Jane Seymour at Wolf Hall, and the Flying Monk of Malmesbury, and Hannah Twynnoy being done in by a tiger. And Stonehenge and Avebury, of course.

I managed to get all the White Horses in; Broad Town, Hackpen, Cherhill, Devizes, Alton Barnes, Pewsey, Westbury. I even managed to squeeze in the Uffington horse, despite it being in Oxfordshire, because it featured on the sleeve of the album English Settlement, by Swindon's greatest band, XTC.

And I've indulged my love of aeroplanes by adding the quirky Edgley Optica (built at Old Sarum), a Spitfire (built in Trowbridge), a Chinook on manouevres on Salisbury Plain, a BE2 and a Boxkite at Upavon and an Avro York taking off from Lyneham. 

And because history isn't all fancy dress and morris dancing, there's the Battle of the Bean Field, and the Handsel sisters, murdered by the locals because they were a bit foreign and blamed for a smallpox outbreak; and buried in different places around the woods to stop their spirits getting together for further mischief.

And lots more besides. I'm afraid that Corsham and its peacocks didn't get in, because I wanted to do a nice picture of Bradford on Avon, which went a bit far north. I hope the locals can forgive me; I'd hate to have another Tiverton incident.

You can get a copy from Devizes Books, or from my boat if you can find me; or from my Etsy shop. 

Claudite jam rivos, pueri, sat prata biberunt.

new tea towels of the Wiltshire White Horses and the Kennet and Avon Canal map

 

I've just picked up the new tea towels. There's this one of the Wiltshire white horses, and a map of the Kennet and Avon canal, like this

I'm very pleased with the quality of the printing; all the fine details are there, clear as you like. (The images here are low-res, because I'm out in the wilds of the Vale of Pewsey at the moment, and the internet is rubbish.)

They're both available in my Etsy shop (link on this blog) or Devizes Books.

Map of Wiltshire's White Horses

I've re-drawn my Wiltshire White Horses map, because there were elements in the old one I wasn't happy with. And I needed to change the width to height ratio, to fit onto a tea towel (that one's in the pipeline...). So here's the new version, as a print. You can find it in my Etsy shop, linked here

There are currently eight white horses carved onto Wiltshire hillsides. Perhaps the best known are the Westbury Horse which you'll see if you're on the train from Salisbury to Bath; or the Cherhill one which you pass on the A4, the old coaching road and main route between London and Bristol. But there's also Alton Barnes in the Vale of Pewsey's crop circle and UFO heartland; and Devizes, Pewsey, Marlborough, Hackpen and Broadtown.

And it would be positively rude to miss out Uffington, by far the oldest of all the chalk figures, even though it's in Oxfordshire these days.

I've taken liberties with the topography, distances between and orientation of the horses, which don't all lie on southerly-sloping hills in real life. But at least they're more or less in the right relative positions. Vaguely...

There's also scenes from the area's past and present involving horse; the Kennet and Avon canal, with a horse preparing to haul a narrowboat; Wayland the smith shoeing a horse up on the Downs near Uffington; the Wadworth brewery dray which still delivers their beer around the Devies area.

St Brynach's Cuckoo

Outside the church of St Brynach, in Nevern, Pembrokeshire, is a fine celtic cross. On the saint's feast day, April 7th, the first cuckoo of the year will be heard calling from the top of the cross.

But we were there the day before, and missed it. So I've drawn it instead.

In the past, we've heard the cuckoos of the Nevern valley calling in the distance, from the Parrog, where we used to go camping at Easter.

But this was my first visit to the church at Nevern.

The churchyard was full of wild garlic and yew trees

Up the hill from the church are these steps, worn smooth into the rock by the feet of pilgrims on their way to St David's.

And back down in the churchyard, here's the bleeding yew.

the Aldermaston Wharf Tea Rooms

Aldermaston Wharf is a lively spot on the Kennet and Avon Canal in Berkshire; ABC hireboats operate from there, and these rather fine tea rooms, that I've just done this picture of. There's prints of it over in my Etsy shop, and it's one of six postcards in my latest set.

ice on the canal

The last few days have been very cold; my thermometer showed a ground temperature dropping to -12C overnight. And the canal is frozen over, up to IC5-6 on the Canal Ice Scale.

But boaters need to stay warm, and not all of them can get to a coal merchant and carry sacks back to their boats. So there are fuel boats serving the canals. But the West End of the Kennet and Avon, from the bottom of the Caen Hill locks below Devizes to Bath, didn't have a working boat after the last operators stopped, last year.

So the folk at Bradford Wharf Services,* in conjunction with charity Floaty Boat, have organised fuel runs on Ishtar, crewed by volunteers. Here they are in action; they arrived here in Bathampton on Wednesday, and breasted up on my boat overnight as the light was failing.

Shortly after setting off on Thursday morning, they had to stop; the ice was just too thick. We're all waiting for the thaw now.

*this is a link for ordering fuel for your boat; there's also an option for 'paying it forward', where you can put in funds for fuel for boaters who can't afford it.

Saint Roch in the forest

Saint Roch caught the Plague while ministering to its victims in Piacenza, Italy; he retired into the forest, where a virtuous dog brought him bread and licked his sores until he was healed. So Roch ended up beatified, but nobody remembers the dog's name. Unlike Saint Guinefort, a greyhound whose story is very similar to that of the welsh dog Gelert, and who became a folk saint (that is, popular with the people, not so much with the Church).

I based Roch on a person who lived in the woods on the canalside until recently; and the dog is Bobby, another boaty neighbour's companion. I like the idea of using rather more contemporary models for saints; like my version of Melangell, who was a bit of a hunt sab in her day, but is usually portrayed a bit drippily.