'Cool' as boy pulls aqueduct plug - BBC News
Was that all it was? It's one of those events that's more exciting in the build-up, but what the heck, let's celebrate it.
Apart from the initial "I was really nervous at the beginning because I didn't have a clue what we were doing," the local schoolboy who pulled the plug knew his lines and sang all the right notes for the BW PR people. They must have been gratified when he said:
"It was built by Thomas Telford, and I know that he was one of the first people to introduce health and safety."
Perhaps at primary school these days they start with health & safety and move on to employment legislation for GCSE, only going on to engineering at A-Level.
Visions Postcards photographer Sheila Halsall was there, and came away with a new set of images to replace the 1998 picture on her postcard. (She's kindly sent me some of her new shots, starting with the lovely moody image at top. Thanks, Sheila! A chainsaw would have made the picture perfect, but I suspect we are limited by the Environment Agency.)
She says the draining took several hours, much longer than predicted by the PR people.
I was struck by how the plume coming out reminds me of a - um, like a, well, like a giant man relieving himself.
Sheila also witnessed the BW staff trying to unblock the recess where they put the boards to stank off the aqueduct.
I would have liked to witness it myself - but then again, I find these things are always far more interesting when one has the discovery to oneself. If you turn it into a PR ceremony there's a sense of anti-climax.
This is because the very act of wanting to share something is half the thrill. If you know that everyone is discovering it at the same moment as you, you are deprived of the fun of bursting to tell other people.
Update: There's a short phone video from Dave Roberts of the draining on the Shropshire Star website in its story Work well underway on historic structure. It zooms in after 30 secs to show about 8 people on the structure - rather fewer than I'd expect. Unlike in Telford's day, health & safety wasn't a consideration - none of them appear to have been wearing base-jumping parachutes!
Update 2: Elsie of NB Bendedig was there too. She's got a great photo of the very second that the water starts to trickle out and the very crowd that gathered below to watch it. Sheila might be in the picture somewhere, but it's awfully overgrown down there.
At the time the aqueduct was built the valley must have been more like scrubland, but trees are in fashion now and the environment people let them grow just for the sake of it, with never the thought of landscape gardening. When Telford was building the aqueduct, the idea of controlling tree growth on aesthetic gardening grounds was much more common.
Nowadays there's a fetish for uncontrolled tree growth. You can't even see the woods for trees.
I see on the BBC site that the aquaduct wasn't 'drained' but 'de-watered'.
Posted by: Andrew | Thursday, 12 November 2009 at 01:02 PM