Janathon Day 15: The rubble of an industrial past

Janathon Day 15: Walk 11.3km, Time 2hr 20min, Weather grey and windy

Although I have done quite well so far photographing animals I have failed with diggers. We obviously need diggers to show the economy has not totally frozen-up and there are still earthworks being done in Hemel.

So I wandered down the canal to a site I know is being developed. There were diggers but I had a slight change of plan as I liked the look of the rock crushing machines, parked neatly between a huge mound of rubble and some big skips. I will have to make up for it later with real diggers.

The kid in me likes watching heavy plant: they have a faint look of dinosaurs hunting their rock prey.  The name also amuses me, whenever I see a road warning sign saying "heavy plant crossing" I always imagine trees on the march. It doesn't take much to keep me happy!

That said I have mixed feelings about this particular development. it is on the site of the old John Dickinson paper mill at Nash Mills and any connection with large scale paper manufacture in the area has now been bulldozed away. I find this sad because because continuous paper making was pioneered at Apsley, a couple of miles away, at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century and for two centuries this area was at the heart of the industry. 

But all companies, like any type of organism, have a life cycle and the economics of manufacture change. They stopped making paper here in 2006 and you cannot keep an old works empty to gradually decay, something has to be done with the land.

But I will miss the old brick wall backing onto the canal. I like to be reminded of the industrial past of canals  and how many of the buildings alongside them were manufacturing works or warehouses. I like a sense of history and a visible thread but once the land is covered in bijou apartments and houses it is all lost.

However whatever the scenery, whether it is open countryside, the backend of a town, or desirable housing I love being by the canal,  even when I am only walking. I might have a certain amount of envy when I look at the runners who pass, but it is small and I know it should be managed by saying to myself 'I will soon be doing that'. However it is difficult, when the knee seems to be healing in geological time, to stop myself saying 'I used to do that'. 

That is not the right tense. I might want a sense of history when I look at the canal but I don't want that history to be me