Foxton Locks offers an excellent learning environment that extends beyond the classroom and helps schools deliver learning opportunities to inspire in a creative and authentic way.
Education
Starting Point Narratives
Foxton Canal Museum has lots of narratives from a span of 200 years that can serve as a great starting point for any projects. Students can access these cross curricula to explore life on the waterways across time.
Extract from Journeys of the Swan by John Liley in 1972
(Students can compare the decline to the regeneration of the canal)
Staircase locks are not separated by short stretches of water. The top gate of one lock is also the bottom gate of the next. Thus, a narrow boat needs no steering whatsoever. Unfortunately, a boat going up a staircase cannot pass another coming down and so, at Foxton, the builders divided the works into two staircases of five locks each, with a short pool in between.
Alongside is the site of the celebrated Foxton Incline Plane which was dismantled shortly after its opening in 1900. Two great tanks would trundle sideways up and down a ramp on the hillside, the one counterbalancing the other. Ideally each caisson would contain two narrow boats, but traffic was sporadic, even then.
We wanted to explore the site of this phenomenon and accordingly thrashed about in the bramble bushes which had grown on the ramp. Little remains, apart from the odd culvert and foundations of the engine house. The linking arm at the top is now dry and only retains a few patches of treacly swamp.
Read more on the PDF
Mrs Daisy Dainty
Daisy was daughter to the lock keeper at Foxton from 1909. She remembers using the incline plane at the end of its life, to move house.
The boat got into the side pond to go down. There were a pair of boats in the tank at the bottom and so they hurried us in the caisson at the top. I can remember the big wheels with the wires around them and a big chimney with smoke coming out of the top – the fire must have been going all night.
I thought that when we went down in the tank would tip and the water splash out. I think mother was afraid too, but we went gently down, the other tank passing us halfway; it took just over five minutes.
The guillotine gate went up and we swam out into the side pond. The horse was hooked up and pulled us round to Kibworth bridge. We had dinner at the bottom
I thought I was in a strange world below Foxton, having come down the big hill – father had talked of Kibworth, but we had never seen it.
To read more fascinating stories contact Foxton Canal Museum: learning@foxtoncanalmuseum.org