Cash for Mon & Brec

A TOTAL of £1.5m funding is allowing further restoration of the Mon & Brec, that has now started.

The bulk of the cash, £854,500, has come from a Heritage Lottery Fund, with the rest from Torfaen County Borough Council and regeneration grants, Alan Tilbury reveals.

Eight locks

Work is on a derelict section of the waterway in Cwmbran, with the intention of restoring eight locks over the next three years together with about a mile of the canal.

Some of the money will be used to train new and existing volunteers for canal management techniques and the actual construction. It is calculated that 270 volunteers will come forward.

The Mon & Brec was the waterway that suffered breaches owing to its instability, it being closed well over a year for one breach, and subsequently British Waterways located a total of 300 leaks.  It also suffers water shortage owing to its main supply being from the Usk, with limited extraction allowed.  Still another problem is that with no many leaks, dredging cannot be undertaken for fear of making these worse.

Suspect statistics

Statistics were of course used to assist, with Richard Dommett, Regeneration Manager for the trust quoting British Waterways: '13 million people visit waterways every year, almost 20 million cycle visits are made to canals and with 35,000 boats afloat across the UK, canals and rivers are now busier than they were at the height of the industrial revolution'(!)