Page 24 - SAFFER Magazine 01

Canal Root Surgery…

There comes a time, when history and ag-
ony meet… on a dingy dentist’s chair. Or,
better still… there comes a time when one
strolls down a towpath of history… to be
rid of the pain. Pain? Yep… that pain akin
to a longing for the wild outdoors.

Canals, roots… pain? Yep… I came to an
alien place, where elephants didn’t walk…
where meercats didn’t stand tall. A place
where rivers didn’t roar… or rush down
gullies too steep to swim. I came to a place
where golden sunsets bewitched… where
the toolmarks of bygone generations were
etched on stones… where the waters ran
slow. So slow in fact… that a ditch could
be dug… right across an island. Well,
almost.

Cut a canal… into the root of the land. Cut
a root into the canal. So… there I was, looking west. Into the sunset. The very same sunset so many before
had witnessed. The only thing… many of those lookers had looked across a land without the hope of the
ditch… and now, here I was standing… looking at the toolmarks of long-gone masons. Here I stood… look-
ing at walls built, bridges constructed. Where did the builders go? No… not to the land I’d come from.

No, in this land there were no lions… no wild lonely plains. Here was a flatness… and famine. Here was a
need to cut a ditch. And, here I stood, wondering… where are the elephants? Oh well, I thought… the pio-
neers have gone. To distant lands. So, what am I doing here… wandering along a towpath?

A fact that caught me early... the Royal Canal reached Kilcock in County Kildare two decades before the
1820 Settlers set foot in Algoa Bay. The roots of the stories about the canals lay in the history of the land. Two
canals originate along the Liffey, the river that cuts through Dublin Town. The Royal and the Grand. Two
canals… two sets of engineering works carried out with picks and shovels… and sometimes a kilogram or ten
of black powder explosives.

Two canals that meander across the land… linking
towns and villages. Two canals – the projects often
driven forward by blind ambition or mighty egos
of the people living in the 1700’s. but I’ll leave the
detail for another day. Then, you may wonder why
I’m telling you this tale? Because we South Africans
are mostly fascinated by the history and geography
of the systems, because we may have lions and ele-
phants back home, but we don’t have canals… only
crocodile and hippo infested rivers.

So… the pain of the indoors… it drives many out
of their houses and onto towpaths. One can walk

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