I have just spent a few days working from the home of some good friends in the North Town area of Aldershot. By my friends' own admission it is not an area that seems, on the face of it, to enjoy a particularly fine environment: a lot of 1960s-70s era suburban sprawl across fairly flat terrain, enjoying neither the hubbub of the city nor the tranquillity of the countryside.
This makes the discovery I'm about to tell you about all the more startling. On Easter Sunday we set out on a walk to a pub in nearby Ash Vale. For the first two or three minutes you plod past some monolithic low-rise flats and through a small industrial estate and then....bang! You crash headlong into a most wonderful wetland corridor, a veritable artery of water, lush greenery and teeming wildlife, and the walk continues like that to Ash Vale and beyond, along the Basingstoke Canal.
I can show you where this is using the power of Google. Click this link
Make sure you get the whole link, otherwise it won't work. The Basingstoke Canal runs east-west-ish through this map.
So what's so special? Well, for me it's the way this place seems to defy the rules that environmentalists like me have been laying down for what greenspaces, greenways, wildlife corridors and so on should be, in one fundamental way: noise. For most of the walk the roar of the A331 dual carriageway, the descent of aircraft into Gatwick airport, and the steady grumble of a smaller A-road, are the first set of sounds that you hear, and incessant they are too. Yet somehow they make the drama of the place all the more significant. Coming out of Aldershot North Town on the Blackwater Path, you walk alongside a small river meandering along the backs of suburban houses on one side, and a series of large ponds on the other than seem to attract as many anglers as they do midges. You pass a telltale brick sluice structure under the dual carriageway labelled 'flood relief culvert' and suddenly you realise that this is what living on the brink of a floodplain in England could actually be like - it can be great! 400 days out 405 you can pop out of your back garden onto the footpath for a walk, a cycle, a spot of fishing or birdwatching; then occasionally you seal up the backdoor, set up the camping gear in the bedroom and wait for the waters to subside. All it would take would be a bit of re-planning, a little engineering here and there, and all these nasty floodplains would quickly be seen for what they really are - glorious oases.
Moving on a little further, you walk right underneath the thundering dual carriageway, past a little boxed off bridge pier where some unfortunate has set up a home that comprises two mattresses and some empty beer cans, and then up some steps onto.....my God! An aqueduct carries the Basingstoke Canal across the dual carriageway. First of all you can't help but stand on this bridge, with 5 feet of calm, quiet water behind you and a 50 metre strip of tarmac insanity buzzing away below. It's like standing within the frame of a racetrack computer game. The noise is relentless and these abstract wheeled lumps of metal whizz in bizarre synchronous patterns in opposite directions guided by some mysterious force. What a time-traveller would think arriving at this point is beyond me. Yes, it's alien to the landscape, and it affronts the senses. Yet somehow the way this road carves through the place somehow puts the rest of it into context, into relief. Without the road this place would be 'nice'. With the road, it is pure drama.
The scene becomes more interesting as you walk a little further along the aqueduct, glancing back to notice a narrowboat making a half-hearted attempt to catch you up. It dawns on you that you can see for at least half a mile around, and that the whole canal is raised up on an embankment that crosses a broad swathe of marshland with lakes, tall trees and all manner of birds. The builders of the Basingstoke Canal must have actually constructed an embankment at least 20 metres tall and probably 40-50 metres wide at its base, to carry a waterway across a wetland! No doubt a much easier solution than trying to create channels within the boggy wetlands and then build locks to follow the contours. But unless you came to this spot, and saw that it had been done, you'd never have believed it.
Of course, the canal might be the highway of its age but it nevertheless operates at walking pace, or sometimes these days cycling pace, never at the blinding speed of the dual carriageway. But it is still a massive human intervention into this damp, wild landscape. And what I can't tell from here is how much the lakes and trees of the wetlands have themselves been reshaped by man. Is the whole thing a giant flood management/reclamation area? There are certainly a lot of criss-crossing paths where the anglers are idling their day, and in one of the lakes there is a weed-encrusted brick structure, so that has a story to tell too.
And in the end what really strikes you is, for all this embankment building, road slicing, aqueducting, and all this noise, you can still hear the birdsong going hell-for-leather, and see the geese skidding to a stop on the lake, and walk through the web of a spider that has set up camp in preparation for an al fresco feast of midges. Nature doesn't care about our silly earthmoving capers and our 80mph toys. It doesn't care that we etch our developmental conquests on the bedpost of the landscape. It does its own thing, in its own time. I think it might even be laughing at us.
AW.
