The Old Canal, Buscot Wharf, Buscot and Coleshill Estates

Summary

The partially silted remains of a canal, canal basin and wharf. Constructed by Edward Loveden Loveden in the late 18th - early 19th century when the estate was at a prosperous high point.

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Description

A partially silted up canal protruding southward from the extremity of an acute meander of the Thames. It is about 125m. long and up to about 12m. wide. At present its depth varies up to about 2.5m. at its south end where there is some water. There is some buried brickwork on the west side of the south end, the purpose of which is not clear, but probably a building associated with the wharf. Originally the south end of the canal would have turned east into a basin in front of the two warehouse buildings (now dwellings see 153126 and 153133), for unloading, loading and turning. This basin is filled in, apparently for a long time, as the 1876 O.S.maps depicts it as filled.
The canal was dug in the late 18th early 19th century when the Buscot Estate was at a prosperous high point under its owner Edward Loveden Loveden. In 1789 the Thames and Severn Canal, which joins the Severn to the Thames at Lechlade, was opened, which immediately increased the prospect of trade along the Thames. Loveden was a Thames Commissioner and was heavily involved in improving navigation on the Upper Thames, including building locks. It was to take advantage of this increase trade that Loveden cut the canal and built the wharf and warehouses.
Buscot at that time had at least one other wharf, located just to the west of the Old Parsonage (150630), where the Lechlade road (A417) comes close to the river, see 150650. It is not clear when this wharf was established, but in 1839 it belonged to the Buscot Estate (Buscot Tithe map 1839), it was then noted as a Cheese Wharf. Before Campbell built his factory complex on Brandy Island (not N.T.) and provided a third wharf, in the 1860's, it was known as the "ware ground", which may allude to the use of the island as a lading point, which could have gone some distance back into the past. (1859-60 conveyance. B.R.O. D/ECH.T30).
Although Mavor says in his "General View of the Agriculture of Berkshire 1809", when almost certainly referring to the wharf at the above N.G.R. - "From the wharf at Buscot, belonging to Mr. Loveden, on which warehouses are built for the reception of cheese, and rented by the cheese-mongers of London, not less than between two and three thousand tons of cheese are annually sent down the Thames".
It would be wrong to think that cheese was Loveden's sole concern, he probably wanted to trade in a wide variety of goods to and from his estate. In fact one other commodity was of great importance - coal. Before the opening of the Thames and Severn Canal, coal was supplied from the mines of north-east England. It had to be shipped down the North Sea to London, transhipped to smaller vessels for the Thames, and then brought all the way up-river to Buscot almost at its navigable end, consequently coal was expensive. The opening of the Thames and Severn Canal relieved the situation because coal could be obtained at far less cost from the South Wales or Forest of Dean coalfields. When the estate was sold to Campbell in 1859, the deeds of the site of Buscot Wharf is described as " Buscot Coal Wharf with Cottage".
By 1876 the 24" O.S. map marks the Canal as Old Canal. Campbell had built his light railway (150619, 150645), a branch of which ran along the south side of the filled canal basin. He had also dug a reservoir about 30m. to the west of the canal's south end, the reason for this is not entirely clear. It may have been to top up the canal when the water level dropped, as it must have done because of the flash locks in use at that time down stream on the Thames. See 150636 and 150637. The water may have been fed into the canal basin through the brick culvert still visible in the end of the small pond, located between the south end of the reservoir and the canal basin. The reservoir itself was probably kept filled by the stream running from Buscot village through a deep channel (now about 6m. wide and 1.5m. deep), alongside the railtrack from the Buscot lock area. This is clearly depicted on the 1876 25" O.S. map. This channel still survives, it is now dry as the running water is diverted to the Thames by a ditch nearer to the village. This diversionary ditch must have been there in Campbell's time because the remains of the brick bridge abutments where the railway track crossed it are still extant, it was possible closed off by a sluice gate arrangement that prevented the reservoir from being overfilled. The channel is in a belt of trees and bushes marking a field boundary and is marked on a modern map as a drain. There are the remains of brick bridge abutments where the rail track crossed the channel close to where it entered the reservoir. The reservoir is now filled in and the site delineated by a slightly raised stony area. (1-3)

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