Sunday Times Where Was I? Holiday Competition

Near as I can figure it, through the possibly flawed perceptual filters of my own reality tunnel, the most likely answers this week, seem to me to be:


Q1. The Hereford and Gloucester Canal (aka The Gloucester and Hereford Canal aka The Herefordshire and Gloucestershire canal)


Q2. Stephen Ballard

внимание друзья! for question 1, some of Stephen Ballard's biographies state that he worked for the Gloucester and Hereford Canal Company and some references and sources say the canal is called the Gloucester and Hereford canal but others call it the Hereford and Gloucester Canal, while others call it The Herefordshire and Gloucestershire Canal......


The initial clues seem to place us in the vicinity of the market town of Ledbury, in Herefordshire. This appears to be the birthplace (c 1878) of John Masefield, a free spirited nomad and poet laureate from 1930 to 1967. Who can fail to like someone who penned the lines "When I am buried, all my thoughts and acts, will be reduced to lists of dates and facts" ?  

An author born c 1806, who lived at Hope House, in Hope End, some two miles or so north north east of Ledbury, is most likely Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett, who later became Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when she married the poet Robert Browning, c 1846 and moved to Italy. EBB had the two Barretts in her name for complex legal reasons, to do with getting an inheritance from her father, who was loaded. Barrett senior built the Turkish style mansion of Hope House.

A canal which once passed through Ledbury, before sections of it were replaced by the Worcester and Hereford Railway, is most probably the Hereford and Gloucester canal, which according to some of the sources I checked was around thirty four miles long. The Ledbury viaduct has thirty one arches and is around three hundred and thirty yards long. Both the viaduct and the canal, seem to have been built by an engineer called Stephen Ballard (born c 1804). The viaduct has five million bricks in it and these were made from clay excavated from the site, by Ballard's brother.

The OS map shows a canal section around four miles north west of Ledbury and the 13th century castle one mile to the west of this, is probably Ashperton castle, which may have been a fortified manor house built c 1292. There is not much at the site apart from what looks more like fishponds, rather than a moat. The Romans liked to build their forts near a road and the A4172 was originally a Roman road which passed a fort at Canon Frome (there does not seem to be much evidence of it now, on either the map or the satellite photographs)