History
There was originally a weir and ferry here belonging to Goring Priory, which became the property of millers who kept a flash lock. A report in a newspaper of 1674 tells how 60 people drowned in the lock when the ferryman rowed too close to it. The pound lock was built in August 1787 from oak. Over several decades operation of the lock appears to have been shared with that of Cleeve Lock until 1869. Following this there were plans to build a lock-house, but this was not started until 1879. The lock itself was replaced in 1886. In the last rebuild in 1921 the lock had intermediate gates installed, making two pounds, but these were removed in the refit in 2003.
Read more about this topic: Goring Lock
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)