Earlswood Lakes
Earlswood Lakes, a series of canal reservoirs, created in the Imperial period to serve the Stratford upon Avon canal. A pumping station survives, but the engine has been removed from the building.
1 The Earlswood lakes are a most impressive series of reservoirs constructed to serve the Stratford Canal. A tall brick engine house survives, built to house a beam pumping engine of 1823, but the machinery has gone.
2 The Earlswood reservoirs with their water surface of 85 acres and capacity of 34 million cubic feet….begun in 1821. Most of the water lay below canal level, thus in 1822 a steam engine was bought….it pumped until 1936, in later days the boilers were out and a large vertical boiler was installed outside.
3 The building is described but is at SP1174 and is therefore not in Warwickshire, although the lakes are.
- For the sources of these notes, see the
- Timetrail record
- produced by the Historic Environment Record.
Comments
There were footpaths around the lakes which were surfaced with loose aggregates. In the 1990’s and 2000’s I was involved with a voluntary group called the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (later the BTCV) which had the long term job of resurfacing the paths. I was told that the paths had originally been built by Italian POW’s in the 1940’s. If that is the case, they had done a good job, if they only needed resurfacing that much later on. So we did it over a period of a few years, on volunteer days. We would re-dig the paths, put down coarse aggregates and finally surface it with finer aggregates. We had one of our local MP’s turn up one morning to help: James Plaskitt, who was Labour MP for Warwick & Leamington at the time.
I will have to go back there at some point to see if they are holding up after all of our work!
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