A beautiful, guided ‘virtual’ walk full of fascinating context and history, led by BRLSI’s Dick Bateman. Here is Dick’s description: “This is a walk through the lovely village of Saltford, where I have the good fortune to live. We will celebrate seven engineers and visionaries, who built routeways through this village and went on to become celebrated in Britain and internationally. The routeways are: The Kennet and Avon Canal The A4 road, once the Bristol to Bath Turnpike The Great Western Railway The Midland Railway – which has now turned into the Bristol to Bath Cycleway. John Hore and John Padmore surveyed and designed the Kennett and Avon Canal for strictly industrial reasons, though their creation has now become a domestic and leisure asset to the area with narrow boats providing homes and tow paths becoming a city to city river trail. Charles McAdam and his Macadamisation of The Bristol–Bath Turnpike, now the A4. Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s GWR railroad is still used for Bristol to London trains. William Eckersley and John Bayliss’s Midland railway from Bristol to Bath And finally John Grimshaw who saw the national potential for cycleways, started here and oversaw 10,000 miles of British cycleways. We have learned how the cities of Bristol and Bath have been linked in many changing ways and how sleepy old Saltford has featured in some of the nation’s key moments of routeway creation.”

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