The Waterways of the South A brief insight into the main fishing rivers of Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire

The fishing rivers of Hampshire
Hampshire is well established as being the maritime heart of England with its ports and Southampton Water with its estuaries link the mouths of some of the most beautiful and private rivers of the whole of Southern England. Lymington and Buckler's Hard on the Beaulieu river lies to the east of the county while the Test, Itchen and Meon lie in the centre and to the east.

All three of these are well established fishing rivers, well known for their fine trout. The Meon is probably the less well known and its quiet valley is not affected by the traditional riverside villages as East and West Meon and Droxford. A larger town is Wickham which boats a watermill and a brewery from Victorian times and the rivers sweeps to he west of Fareham past the Abbey at Titchfield through pleasant meadowland and also alongside modern motorways and large sections of development.

The Bridge over the Itchen at Mansbridge

The river Itchen is a very different river, but its surrounding countryside is very similar. Winchester, a city that has significantly affected the nature of the river since the twelfth century. lies at its heart. It was near the end of that century that   the Bishop of Winchester, Godfrey de Lucy, built a reservoir and had the river dredged to ensure an adequate water supply for the mills at Alresford and to make it navigable between Winchester and the sea.

 During this process he made one of the earliest river navigations in England, and this survived until the fifteenth century. This was restored yet again in 1710 and the river remained as a navigation until the middle of the 19th century. There can still be found traces of locks and hopefully the whole of the navigation may be restored to its former glory. The upper reaches of the Itchen are famed for the growing of watercress, old mills and the Watercress Line Steam Railway at Alresford. But as the river nears the port of Southampton it is less attractive mainly due to heavy development and industry.

The River Test though is probably the most attractive river in the South especially so by fishermen who can often be found on it banks which are mostly private.

The River Test at Whitchurch

This is an easy river to explore by car though, rising in the  Downs of Wiltshire and flowing through some pretty villages such as Hurstbourne Tarrant, St Mary Bourne and Longparish. There is a paper mill at Laverstoke. where they produce the paper that is used in the making of banknotes and a silk mill can be found at Whitchurch. The old coaching town of Stockbridge has its watercress beds and thatched cottages.

Further south though the river flows through woodland and is overlooked by the 18th century Houghton Lodge and 12th century Mottisfont Abbey. Romsey is the largest town on the Test and with its abbey and Broadlands the former home of Lord Mountbatten of Burma maintains a style and elegance that blends in well with the river. The Test was never a navigable river but it has been closely followed by the Andover Canal which was an unrewarding venture that operated from 1794 until 1859 and hardly anything remains of the 24 locks that were in operation here.

The Hampshire Avon and its tributaries

Rising on the Wiltshire Downs the River Avon rises  near Pewsey, and crosses Salisbury Plain, then on  through the hills of Hampshire in a wooded valley and before joining the sea at Christchurch. The river is long and varied and matches the countryside that it flows through, this river is also a favourite with fishermen and salmon and trout can be found here. It carries the memory of hundreds of years of English history stretching far back to the days of Stonehenge and Woodhenge to some of the latest military technology. At Braemore is an Elizabethan manor house and Heale house which was a hiding place for King Charles after the Battle of Worcester.

Salisbury with its towering spire and 17th and 18th century architecture is seen reflecting all the historical associations of the river and the river also gains fame in paintings by Constable.

To the south of Salisbury lies Fordingbridge which is on the edge of the New Forest and flanks the Avon to the east. Christchurch is a town that has spread itself all around the Avon estuary, and has all the pleasures usually associated with the seaside.

The Avon is un-navigable but attempts have been made to link Salisbury to the sea via the river and during the 17th and early 18th century it was developed as a navigation and barges reached the city up until 1730, but the river was so difficult to navigate that it was abandoned in 1772 and the only trace today is an old lock near Britford. The Salisbury and Southampton Canal which branched fro the Andover Canal was attempted later and was just as unsuccessful, costing a huge amount of expenditure to build. It was never finished and only operated for three years until it too was abandoned in 1808. There are still traces of this scheme surviving but are difficult to find.

Salisbury though is s till a waterway centre and the Avon can be seen in various parts of the town joined by tributaries, the Bourne, Wylye and the Nadder.

The Bourne flows across the Plain passing through some pretty little villages but has one or two sinister overtones, such as Porton and Boscome, both Ministry of Defence establishments. Both the Wylye and the Nadder have interesting valleys, the Wylye starting near Warminster has some interesting churches along its course, Longbridge Deverill, Heytesbury and Stockton.

The Nadder rises just north of Shaftesbury in Dorset and its valley has some fine houses that include the Palladian Pythouse, the classical Phillips House completed in 1816 and two Wardour Castles, one of which is the ruin of a 14th century fortress that has some fine Renaissance details from the 16th century, the other was designed by James Paine in 1768 and is a rather extravagant but well balanced mansion.

To the east where the Nadder and Wylye meet can be found the famous carpet town of Wilton with its fine 17th century Wilton House that was designed by Inigo Jones. The Nadder also has a rather distinctive cream coloured tufa stone that is used in the construction of cottages such as can be found at Dinton. The stone is quarried near Chilmark which lies a mile northwards.
 

The Dorset Stour
There are two River Stours in the south one in Kent and the other in Dorset, the latter  has very little in common with the former.  The Dorset Stour rises at Stourhead, which is one of the earliest eighteenth-century landscape gardens, that has lakes,  temples and wooded area. It flows to the south through Gillingham and the beautiful countryside that has much in character with the area.

The Stour has associations with the Dorset novelist, Thomas Hardy and it is featured mainly in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The fine towns of Blandford Forum, Crawford Bridge, Kingston Lacy and Wimborne Minster  with their elegant buildings are a well known feature of the Stour as it flows ever onwards to Christchurch where it meets the sea.

The Frome and its tributaries
Though the south Dorset rivers may be small and winding they have many links with the history of the county, with Prehistory shown by Maiden Castle near the Frome (pronounced froom) and the Giant of Cerne Abbas which is carved into the hillside above Cerne. Abbeys are to be seen some dark and romantic, the ruins of Bindon lay on the banks of the Frome and there are some extremely fine examples of architecture and gardens at Athelhampton on the River Piddle and Minterne on the Cerne.

At Cattistock the Frome passes some fine churches, and at Cerne Abbas and Charminster which is on the Cerne, there are some sombre memorials, and Dorchester which was in Judge Jeffrey's area during his reign of terror after the Monmouth Rebellion. History is again shown, this time modern with the Tank Museum at Bovington which overlooks the Frome valley. The source of the Frome is in the hills that lie to the east of Beaminster, it then flows through a steep valley via Maiden Newton to Dorchester and on through more open countryside where it eventually reaches the sea at Wareham. The Cerne and the Piddle or Trent is two of its tributaries. Cerne has Godmanstone with one of the smallest public houses in the country, while the oddly named Piddle has some even more oddly name villages such as Puddletown, Affpuddle, Briantspuddle, Tolpuddle and Piddletrenthide.

All of these rivers have connections with literature, and the spirit of Thomas Hardy can be seen everywhere, from Higher Bockhampton above the Frome, where he was born, to over settings that can be easily identified in his writing.

Dorset is also associate with T. E. Lawrence, or as he was better known, Lawrence of Arabia; as his house Cloud's Hill is situated on the hills above the Frome.

The Kennet and Avon Canal and its connections
The  River Thames has links with the River Severn as the cross-country route of these were linked with the Kennet and Avon Canal which was finished in 1810 and was made from three waterways. The river Kennet navigation from Reading to Newbury was opened in 1723 and the Avon navigation from Bath to Haham near Bristol was opened four years later and the canal itself built in 1810 to link the two together.

This is a rather attractive canal and was build on a grand scale, encompassing some wide locks and elegant aqueducts. It travels through a varied landscape and links many towns of great architecture, such as Bath, Bradford-on-Avon, Hungerford. Devizes and Newbury.

Nowadays a few obstacles still remain, such as the flight of 29 locks at Caen Hill just outside of Devizes and in numerous places where the road crosses the canal. But work still progresses and one day boats will once again be able to travel from Bristol to the Thames.

A lot of the canals route is remote but it is easy to explore as a good towpath runs throughout its length and there are a number of features such as the locks at Caen Hill, the Limply Stoke aqueduct, the steam pumping engine at Crofton the tunnel that goes under Savernake Forest.

During its prime the canal was part of a much larger waterway network. At the western end near to the Dundas Aqueduct at Limpley Stoke the remains of the junction with the Somerset Coal Canal can be see,. This was opened in 1805 and was designed to link the Somerset coalfield with the other canals in the inland waterway network. And this massive undertaking had flights of locks, inclined planes, tunnels and aqueducts and in the 1830s and 1840s over 100,000 tons of coal were carried from more than 20 coalmines. It remained operating until the 1890s when the railways decided to build their lines over its course.

Its route can still be traced though, and the Midford aqueduct and the Combe Hay Locks can still be seen.

The third cross-country waterway was the Wiltshire and Berkshire Canal. This is a long forgotten canal that used to run from Abingdon on the River Thames to where it linked up with the Kennet and Avon at Semington, to the west of Devizes. This canal was opened in 1810 and was a remote construction with no engineering features, and was built mainly to supply another route for the coal from Somerset to Oxford and then on up to the Midlands. It avoided major towns and cities but branches were linked to Calne, Chippenham and Wantage.

This canal was profitable up until 1870 and then it started to decline, again due to the railways and it was finally abandoned in 1914. The canal though can still be traced as much of it passed through farmland, and the best place to start is at Wootton Bassett, as several old locks are here, and its course is easy to spot near Wantage,

The canal was linked to the Thames and Sever by a short branch in 1819, and the North Wiltshire canal helped to put more traffic on it. The route can be seen at Cricklade where what is left of two aqueducts, one over the Thames, and the old canal basin at Latton, where it joined the Thames and Severn remain.

In Wiltshire and Berkshire alone there are over 65 miles of canal that lie forgotten and is a legacy of the 'canal mania' that gripped the early 19th century.