The purpose of the exercise was to ride from Bath common to the picturesque town of Devizes.  Once there, we’d camp for the night and return.  The promise was evocative, 30 or so kilometres of pastoral scenery slipping by as we pedaled with minimum energy through it.

Bikes tested and tyres inflated we set off.  The barges floated by, and we were cocooned within a tunnel of deep foliage, then on into an eternalised realm of stonework, lightly covered with a patina of moss.  And of lock gates; creaking apertures of steel and timber.  These massive structures, which in common with Roman siege engines, grind upon wrought iron ratchets worn through over-use, the metallic clank of cogs transferring the weight of the gates into the onrush of water.   Then the  release.   The dark, grey green backwash of gurgling, laughing water.   Solidity, ancient of days as distinct from the lightness, the texture, inky black and mirror smooth.

Along the way, leaf shrouded in dark greens and vivid turquoise the path a sand coloured ribbon of dappled sunlight led us along an embankment cut into the side of hill. Perhaps once as industrialised as the thread of a modern highway, now softened and deeply textured by the coppices of Chestnut, Elm and London Plane, between them the roseate hue of Copper Beech and Hornbeam, mixing the canopy above us into a patter of leaf and serrated edge, sunlight shining through the cracks and fissures of leaf weighted tree.

We spent the rest of the day enjoying this journey somewhat lost in time and space.   And between the “closed” embrace of trees, with the intermittent prospect of small villages, defined as always by pleasant stone bridges, the ubiquitous pub, and a milling throng of tourists, we observed the ceaseless flow of traffic upon the canal.

There’s an extraordinary multiplicity about the canals and the boats that travel them.  The sense of travel is “ slowed” to the dull methodical plodding of a horse, a timbre measured in hours, distance being more or less immaterial.   There is “observable” movement. And for the vast majority,  the procession of pencil thin “ narrow boats” confirmed something intrinsically “English”.   This is a community, a water borne community that represents all we terrestrials take for granted, yet unlike the mortgage, the car, and the education, the impression is that this exists as an emphatic statement of being.   It is intrinsic and inviolable and the panoply of passing traffic confirms in essence a streak of very divergent Englishness..

There are the smart boats, beautifully decorated, shining brass, and funnels, possessing all the grace and celerity of the Lusitania upon receipt of the coveted blue ribband.  Then there are the boats for hire, the workaday boats, still smart, but somewhat uniform in utility and appearance, and between them, and their methodical  plodding are the moored boats, the semi abandoned and the “Unfinished Project”.

We looked at these boats, some like garden sheds, overgrown, tarpaulins pitted and holed to reveal crumbling walls, decks stained and fissured, with the telltale signs of ropes, green with age, sagging with the boat in sympathetic communion.  Elsewhere, boats “customised” with elaborate deckhouses identified themselves as long-termers, their superstructure broken, fissured, textured and abandoned, crumbling inwards in recognition that they’d never fit under a bridge.   And the saddest of all, boats, whose roofs, held aloft an entire life, registered in old bicycles, weedy pot plants, car parts, coils of useless rope, children’s toys, and the remnants of a broken clothesline.   A life in passing, this boat and the next as decayed rustic homilies dedicated to the passage of time and human frailty.

Abandonment in all its honesty.  More pathetic than the solitary chimney in the countryside,  a remembrance of lives long gone, stories sinking bit by bit into the oft oozing mud.