Georgian Engineering

We popped over to see my brother briefly today, to drop in a New Home card - he's recently moved house (which is exciting).  

On the way back we took the opportunity to visit the Caen Hill Locks at Devizes as Cathy hadn't; seen them before.  I've never really been much for canal boats, but I fully appreciate the scale of the engineering involved in the canal system and in particular to something like the Caen Hill Locks at Devizes.

There are 29 locks all told, although you can't see all of them in one go, which is probably just as well for the sanity of anyone trying to take their barge from one side of the system to the other.  This is the middle, steepest set of 16 locks.  If you try to do all the locks in one go, they take about 6 hours to get through, depending on the amount of traffic.  

At this time of year the system isn't as busy, although we still saw 5 or 6 boats going up the hill. You can fit two barges into each lock, and it makes sense to try to go through the locks in couples as that way there are potentially more hands available to deal with each set of lock gates.

While walking around we spotted a fair amount of wildlife - several herons for example, some dragonflies, and rather more worryingly some very large hornets.  As I didn't have a longer lens with me I didn't feel at all tempted to try to get a shot of the hornets - discretion was definitely advised!