Basingstoke Canal Revisited

The Basingstoke Canal at the beginning of restoration
 activities. It was a long time before this dredger
actually began operations. Note how well vegetated the
towpath is in the middle distance

A view taken from Odiham Wharf bridge, 2012.
Although the canal looks neat and tidy as do most
waterways today, the price of this organisation is the
total loss of its biological richness

It was late June in 2012 that my wife and I made a visit to the Basingstoke Canal to see how it has developed since its restoration. Repeats of photographs that had been taken in the 1970s were taken from the same position. Although one or two narrow boats were seen, not a single craft was observed actually using the canal, there was one person fishing. This underlines my opinion that following restoration, the Canal is neither one thing nor the other. It is not a major recreation resource, nor does much of the rich wildlife present in the 1970s survive. As will be seen from comparison of the photographs, very little wildlife survives at all, and the current canal landscape is very similar to that of any of Britain’s other waterways. As in the photograph shown in my previous blog of the Kennet and Avon Canal, the water is opaque and brown. No one in their right mind would contemplate drawing a pint of Basingstoke Canal water and downing it today.









At Crookham Wharf, I recorded part of a notice board displaying aspects of the Canal. The following is a quotation from that notice.

    The Canal is a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI),
    teeming with wildlife. It has a huge variety of dragonflies and
    damselflies and has more types of aquatic plant than any other
    water body in Britain. The Greywell Tunnel west of Odiham, is
    Britain’s largest bat hibernation site.

A view looking east from Pondtail Bridge in Fleet in 1975.
Note the rich, and varied surface vegetation as well
as the zone of aquatic vegetation between the bank
and the water. These conditions would have been
ideal habitat for breeding and hunting dragonflies

A view looking east from the old Pondtail Bridge taken from
the same place as the 1975 photograph. The view is blocked
by the recently constructed road bridge

The Basingstoke Canal beyond the recently built road bridge
taken in June 2012. Note the total lack of any surface vegetation.
While there is a considerable biomass of bank-side
aquatic vegetation, very few species are present

Looking at the Canal and its wildlife today, it is certainly neither teeming with wildlife, nor does it support a huge variety of dragonflies. The biodiversity of plant life is very low. Having written it personally way back in the 1970s, I believe the quotation was taken originally from the label for the Willis Museum, Basingstoke display portraying the Canal. In those days, this statement would have been true. The claim that the Greywell Tunnel is the largest bat roosting site in Britain is huge, but if this is so, it underlines how important the Canal was for wildlife in the past.

Pan Listing – Why looking at all species matters…

Epipogium aphyllum, Buckinghamshire August 1971

It has been a privilege, and a joy, that my professional life has allowed me to indulge fully a fascination with the incredible variety of life forms that live on our planet.

Having taught biology briefly, and developed a passion for Lepidoptera, I was appointed a student assistant at Leicester Museum at the beginning of my career. A biological curator in a regional museum is responsible for looking after study collections in all groups of organism. This gives the opportunity to work on that all important vocabulary that I believe is so necessary in evaluating and understand the ecology of our environment.

Leicester museum concentrated on collections of British specimens. These ranged from stuffed animals to the parasites that live in association with these animals. The museum had an active taxidermy department, and I well remember the disgust of a member of the public who had donated a dead hedgehog to the museum, when, in the museum’s acknowledgement of her presentation, it was described as a ‘fine collection of fleas and other parasites’ which had been added to a large spirit collection of small invertebrates all carefully labelled, preserved in alcohol  and stored in jars. The hedgehog itself was not required for the mammal collection. The specimens had to be identified accurately before they were catalogued. What a fantastic beginning this training was for the dedicated pan lister.