Sapperton Tunnel and Thames Source

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Grid Reference: OS Explorer 168

https://cirencesterramblers.org.uk/walking/self-guided-walks.html

Duration: 2.5 hours

Distance: 5 miles

We started in the small Cotswold village of Coates, setting off on a five-mile circular route that would take us towards the Thames & Severn Canal and, eventually, the Sapperton Tunnel. It is the sort of countryside that makes you slow down without actually asking you to slow down. 

Cotswold stone walls, narrow lanes, open fields and the gentle rise and fall of the landscape.

Nothing dramatic but that is precisely the point.

The walk begins quietly, leaving the village behind and heading out into the countryside, green trees but dry yellow fields after the long hot summer we are still experiencing. 

There is something reassuring about these old paths as they have been here for generations, connecting places that, to modern eyes, sometimes seem to have very little reason to be connected at all, but people walked them, and still do.

They walked them to work, to church, to market, to see friends, to get somewhere.

We walk them because we can and perhaps that is one of the small luxuries of getting older and have the time, we don't always have to have a reason.

The route eventually brings you towards the Thames & Severn Canal, although calling it a canal can feel slightly optimistic now. This is the remains of an ambitious piece of eighteenth-century engineering that once connected the River Thames with the River Severn. There is something rather melancholy about walking beside a canal without boats but equally it was shady, it was calm, and there were no other people around for the entire walk, so the place was ours alone.

You can almost imagine what it must once have looked like: barges moving slowly through the countryside, carrying goods and people, stopping at locks and bridges, creating a little highway through the landscape, a busy but calm place of industry, but now nature is reclaiming much of it.

And perhaps that is another thing you notice when you walk, things change, places change, and we change.

The canal eventually leads you towards the great engineering achievement of the walk, the Sapperton Tunnel.

At around two miles long, the tunnel was a serious undertaking when it was built in the late eighteenth century, constructed to carry the canal underneath the Cotswold hills, and for a while it represented a remarkable piece of infrastructure, but today, standing beside it, you are confronted with something rather different, stillness.

Continuing along the Monarch’s Way we followed the old canal through overhanging trees on a rough path still used but much less that in its earlier history.

At this point we took a short diversion to explore one of the contested sources of the Thames., which turned out to be only a marker stone with a pile of dry rocks in a shallow hollow. Not overly impressive but of those ‘we have been there’ moments.

From this point we eventually turn back towards Coates, across open fields, through a farm and then back into the village, the Norman church tower acting as our guiding marker.

• The Sapperton Canal Tunnel is a tunnel on the Thames and Severn Canal with a length of 3,817 yards it was the longest tunnel of any kind in England from 1789 to 1811
• Boats passed through by legging, men literally on their backs on the barges and ‘walking’ along the tunnel walls
• The canal was abandoned by 1933, and subsequent roof falls mean that it is no longer navigable
• The Monarch’s Way is a 625-mile long-distance footpath in England that traces the epic six-week escape route taken by King Charles II in 1651 after his defeat by Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Worcester, running from Worcester down to the coast at Shoreham, West Sussex
• The Thames Head is in a Cotswold meadow called Trewsbury Mead, near Kemble in Gloucestershire where the site sits 360 feet above sea level and is marked by a stone, though the spring is seasonal and often dry during summer

We commenced the walk with a coffee at the Bell at Sapperton and ended it there as well for a well-earned drink and lunch https://www.bellsapperton.co.uk/