I thought this was some sort of pond and although that’s technically correct, it’s a piece of engineering by Marc Isambard Brunel (1769-1849). In short, the Navy needed vast quantities of timber for ships, repairs and maintenance, and the old hand-sawing methods were slow, exhausting and inefficient. Brunel’s answer was not just to introduce steam-powered sawing, but to think about the whole process. Timber could be floated from the South Mast Pond into the canal system, through the lock and onwards towards the sawmill. This is pretty much all that is left of the arrangement and it was discovered in 2008 by archaeologists and uncovered in 2018.
My point of interest though was finding out more about Brunel, who I hadn’t realised was French. He fled to the United States due to the little problem of the French Revolution and it seems that he was lucky to escape with his life as he was a Royalist. Not that any of his work survives from there, but he was the Chief City Engineer for New York and then came to the UK where he promptly lost all his money and ended up in a debtors’ prison. Fearing that he might go and work for Tsar Alexander in Russia, the British Government bailed him out and he was engaged with numerous construction projects.
That’s certainly some biography to have, although he is perhaps now best known for his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel who did much for Great Western Railway, designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the Thames Tunnel (which he worked on alongside Marc) and designed the SS Great Britain. I’d say that this was quite a talented family…. And he made a nice pond.