Cromford Canal; Heavy Horse
May. 17th, 2011 01:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
holdtheskySince I've locked my twitter, I've felt more inclined to post here.
As a kid our family used to walk along Cromford Canal. It's quite a famous place because at the far end is Arkwright's Mill, where spinning and weaving with water was developed.
The one thing which sticks in my mind from those walks was the towpaths and, particularly, their lack of horses, though everywhere there were the ghosts of them: in the existence of the towpath itself, its shape, grade, camber, and so on.
I still have in my mind a point at which a towpath enters a tunnel, and imagining the horse walking into it, the change of the timbre of the sound of its hooves and its slow disappearance into the darkness as if into fog.
I'm not sure, now, if the boatmen would have pushed the boat along using their feet on the tunnel walls, as canalmen sometimes did, the horse travelling overland to the other tunnel entrance. But it hardly matters because the horses were not there.
I had seen canal boats, and felt cheated that I'd never seen one pulled by horses. I remember imagining the curve of the towrope (though I never saw one), slung in what I now know to be called a catenary, like a pigeon in flight.
Columba, the name of the genus of pigeons, comes ultimately from the Greek kolumbos, a diver, because of the perfection of their flight. Most birds we flying around us see are falling for most of their flight: as they approach the ground, a timely wingflap suddenly lifts them, ready to fall again, describing a serrated blade. But, when there are no obstacles, pigeons will fly, instead, in perfect curves, gliding through the air like a diver through water, or a heavy water-logged towrope on a canal. I can imagine the organic rope, no nylon cord, but heavy and old and with a dry, tarry, tobacco-y smell, almost alive itself.
But I can still see the image of the horse now: it seems very important to me. I've never had a clear impression of the barge or the bargemen beyond their effect on the horse's rope. It has a Freudian interpretation, of course, but I hope I'm long past trying to quixotically transcend monkey-me.
The closest I've seen to it to how it feels in my head is the short pit pony sequence in Man with A Movie Camera: (between 4:30 to 5:10 here) (That whole film is worth seeing, by the say, especially the 10 minutes in that clip).
As a kid our family used to walk along Cromford Canal. It's quite a famous place because at the far end is Arkwright's Mill, where spinning and weaving with water was developed.
The one thing which sticks in my mind from those walks was the towpaths and, particularly, their lack of horses, though everywhere there were the ghosts of them: in the existence of the towpath itself, its shape, grade, camber, and so on.
I still have in my mind a point at which a towpath enters a tunnel, and imagining the horse walking into it, the change of the timbre of the sound of its hooves and its slow disappearance into the darkness as if into fog.
I'm not sure, now, if the boatmen would have pushed the boat along using their feet on the tunnel walls, as canalmen sometimes did, the horse travelling overland to the other tunnel entrance. But it hardly matters because the horses were not there.
I had seen canal boats, and felt cheated that I'd never seen one pulled by horses. I remember imagining the curve of the towrope (though I never saw one), slung in what I now know to be called a catenary, like a pigeon in flight.
Columba, the name of the genus of pigeons, comes ultimately from the Greek kolumbos, a diver, because of the perfection of their flight. Most birds we flying around us see are falling for most of their flight: as they approach the ground, a timely wingflap suddenly lifts them, ready to fall again, describing a serrated blade. But, when there are no obstacles, pigeons will fly, instead, in perfect curves, gliding through the air like a diver through water, or a heavy water-logged towrope on a canal. I can imagine the organic rope, no nylon cord, but heavy and old and with a dry, tarry, tobacco-y smell, almost alive itself.
But I can still see the image of the horse now: it seems very important to me. I've never had a clear impression of the barge or the bargemen beyond their effect on the horse's rope. It has a Freudian interpretation, of course, but I hope I'm long past trying to quixotically transcend monkey-me.
The closest I've seen to it to how it feels in my head is the short pit pony sequence in Man with A Movie Camera: (between 4:30 to 5:10 here) (That whole film is worth seeing, by the say, especially the 10 minutes in that clip).
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Date: 2011-05-17 12:21 pm (UTC)