Canal Childhood

My family moved to the Penyparc prefabs at Five Locks in Pontnewydd in 1955 when I was four years old. Thus, when I was a little older, the canal was an adventure playground for myself and the local kids (the other favourite places were “the Old Col”, the former tips and colliery remains at Springvale) and all over the mountain).

Back then, although lock gates had been replaced with wooden shuttering, the filling and emptying mechanisms for the locks was still in use, and periodically, British Waterways would come and drain the locks to clean them out. One time, they were clearing a lock just above the demolished Benniam’s Cottage at Five Locks. The local kids came to watch the work, and I remember several trout taken from the base of the shuttering where falling water kept the water below oxygenated for the trout. They had probably got into the canal as eggs or fry from streams feeding into the canal, and ended up in this oxygenated water. As they lay on the grass flopping about, to our amusement, they were regurgitating newts they had recently swallowed.

And that leads to the annual newting and fishing season every Spring. Deakin’s (Deakie’s) shop at the top of Penyparc would in March, put out the fishing nets on bamboo sticks for sale. Armed with these and jam jars, we would go and hunt the newt and three spined stickleback (at that time, the only fish in the canal). Chiefly we were interested in newts (no herpetological licenses for newt handling then!), of which there were smooth and palmate; one year, a Penyparc lad, Ian Powell, caught a great crested newt, a monster compared to the other species - were we envious! Actually, this was a bit of an anomaly since great crested newts are not normally found in stagnant water, being chiefly found in streams. Perhaps like the trout, it came in from a stream as an egg or very small young newt. It ended tragically for the newt however; it was kept in Ian’s garden in a large sweet jar, again from Deakie’s shop where sweets were sold loose by the quarter pound. Mothers would buy these in the Autumn for storing their home made pickled onions in, and we would appropriate them in the Spring for our catches. One day, it escaped from the jar and his mother trod on it whilst putting out the washing, squashing it - no wonder the great crested newt is rare!

For my first couple of years at the prefabs, there was still the old hump backed canal bridge on Five Locks Road. Then that was replaced by the modern one which guaranteed that Five Locks north of the road was the southernmost limit of navigation of the canal. I stood on the old bridge one day to see the canal full of empty, unused Weston’s (Burton’s) wagon wheel sleeves. I suspect they had “fallen off the back of a lorry”, mistaken for actual wagon wheels.

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