Itchen Navigation - Route

Route

The official head of the canal was at Blackbridge Wharf, Winchester, just to the south of Wharf Mill, a grade II listed water mill dating from 1885, and College Walk, which spans the river at Blackbridge, an eighteenth century stone bridge which is also grade II listed. Below the bridge, the channel splits, with the river flowing to the west and the navigation to the east. Blackbridge Wharf was accessed by Wharf Bridge, the oldest surviving bridge over the navigation, dating from the 1760s. Close by, the manager's house, a warehouse and some stables have also survived. The navigation flows past the grounds of Winchester College, which uses the waterway for rowing practice. The rowing eights use a winding basin just above the remains of St Catherine's Hill Lock, which now contains a modern sluice mechanism, and was the location of a water-powered sawmill, located to the west of the lock.

It passes St Catherine's Hill, an Iron Age hill fort and some plague pits, which were common graves for victims of the 1666 plague. It then passes under the former Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway, whose line from Winchester to Shawford Junction was operational between 1891 and 1966, before being diverted through a culvert under junction 11 of the M3 motorway. Originally this was the site of a bridge which carried the road from Winchester to Botley, but this was replaced by a full headroom concrete tunnel in the late 1930s, when the junction between that road and the new Winchester Bypass was built over the navigation. When the M3 motorway was constructed, following almost the same line as the bypass where it crossed the navigation, the tunnel was reduced to a culvert, although the original plans for the motorway would have destroyed most of the top pound. The building of the M3 across Twyford Down, a small area of ancient chalk downland, was controversial at the time, but the removal of the Winchester Bypass which ran to the west of St Catherine's Hill close to the navigation and its conversion back to grassland has brought tranquility back to the valley. The canal is on the western edge of Twyford Down, and continues through Twyford Lane End Lock before it briefly rejoins the river. Some 220 yards (200 m) south of the junction are Tumbling Bay Hatches, originally used to control levels in the water meadows to the east of the river. A modern sluice was installed just to the north of the 19th century hatches in 1971, and controls flow to the Twyford Drain, the main channel to the east of the navigation, which follows the river channel almost to Shawford Bridge. Modern maps, however, label the drain as the River Itchen.

A leat from this stretch was created at around the time of the construction of the canal to provide water for the Twyford Mead water meadows. Farming of the water meadows continued until around 1930, after the closure of the navigation itself. It was a labour-intensive method of land management, but the controlled flooding of the meadows, with the deposition of silt from the water, enabled the land to produce two crops of hay per year, as well as grazing for sheep and cattle. Demonstrations of the techniques used to flood the meadows are still carried out occasionally.