Egypt4u

Horus wrote:Solar panel technology will certainly improve within a few years and you will be able to get twice the energy from a given area of panels,

I am sure that will be the case H, we only need to look at the advances in battery design to see how technology continually improves.

I am a little negative H because SO many things, particularly in the 'green area' are hyped up with exaggerated claims that can only be achieved in some ideal condition or situation. Unfortunately we don't live in that IDEAL situation. Car fuel consumption figures are classic in that respect. OK if you can drive along at a constant 56mph on a level road and not move your right foot one millimeter.

A quick update of this thread.
Yesterday my daughter accompanied Annie and myself on an afternoon search for wild Blackberries (more of that in another thread) and I located the place where the escaped piggy lived. It appears they are a pair that were rescued from some sort of zoo and the rescuer had made a temporary enclosure on some land that they owned. It is a bit rough and ready to say the least and it will not keep any self respecting pig in for very long, but they seemed very happy and scoffed a couple of stale crumpets I had taken with me to feed the ducks on the canal, the good news from the piggies point of view is that they are not intended to be eaten.


And for LLL to demonstrate just by how much the cottages are built below the level of the canal I took these pictures. The cottages would have been built not so long after the canal was built, so are 150 plus years old. You can see that they are a good 3 metres (10 feet) below the level of the canal water and so demonstrate how watertight the canal actually is.


Taken looking back the other way, just past the locks and the white cottage in the first two pictures.

Nice pics again Horus & those piggies look so cute

That is a definite drop down from the canal. Terrifically interesting how they did this and can you imagine the man hours of work it took to have completed let along the number of hours of thinking and paper and pencil planning that went into the original design?

Can you also imagine being the first home owner of these places looking UP at water? Not sure if that would have made these a hard sell or not. Wonder if, way back when, people even queried this or were they just accepting of this as the way of life or ?

Really interesting pictures of the hogs too and quite agree that fence isn't going to hold them for long.

Back in days of yore LLL, those houses would have been built to house workers of some sort and not as property for sale, so the people living in them would have considered themselves very fortunate to be living in one. And yes the engineering skills that were used to build the canal network was phenominal and many obstacles had to be overcome along the way. Probably the most famous canal engineer was a guy named James Brindley (who you can Google). The thing about water is that it is always flat so your canal cannot go up or down and where it has to change levels some ingenious lock systems were designed to raise and lower the barges.

Really interesting and, now that you mention it, water doesn't really bend to much. Still amazed at the ingenuity of people way back when and the determination it takes to make a place to live.