Caen Hill Locks — lock
Image by caenhillcc from Pixabay

Caen Hill Locks

  • 1 min read
  • 51.353° N 2.026° W

Interesting facts

  • The straight run of sixteen locks up the hillside is ranked among the Seven Wonders of the Waterways and is protected as a scheduled monument.
  • A pump installed at the foot of the flight in 1996 can send about seven million gallons a day back to the top, roughly one lockful every eleven minutes.
  • The 29 locks climb at an average gradient of about 1 in 44, and taking a boat through the whole flight usually takes five to six hours.
  • Before the locks were finished, a tramway carried goods up the hill between Foxhangers and Devizes from 1801 to 1810.
  • Traces of that early tramway survive in the arches beneath the road bridges, where the towpath now passes through.
  • Between 1829 and 1843 the flight was lit by gas lamps, allowing boats to keep working the locks after dark.
  • When old lock gates were replaced in 2010, their timber went to Glastonbury Festival and was built into a bridge named after co-founder Arabella Churchill.
  • More than 30,000 trees were planted around the side ponds in 2012 and 2013 to mark Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee.
  • Since 1984 many locks in the flight have been named after benefactors of the restoration, one of them after the writer and campaigner A. P. Herbert.
  • The last commercial cargo through the flight, in October 1948, was a load of grain carried from Avonmouth to Newbury.

Why it is worth it

Caen Hill Locks form the steepest and most demanding stretch of the Kennet and Avon Canal, climbing the escarpment west of Devizes in Wiltshire. The canal as a whole was engineered by John Rennie and largely built between 1794 and 1801, but the Caen Hill flight, needed to overcome a rise of 237 feet in under two miles, proved so difficult that it was not finished until 1810, making it the last major section of the canal to open.

The flight uses 29 locks in total between the bottom lock at Foxhangers and the top of the hill near Devizes town bridge. Sixteen of these are arranged as a continuous staircase, where the lower gate of one chamber doubles as the upper gate of the next; because there was no room on the slope for the normal side pounds that store water between locks, Rennie's design instead uses large, distinctively shaped side ponds beside the staircase to hold the water needed to refill each chamber. A brickworks was set up on site purely to supply the enormous quantity of bricks needed to line the lock chambers.

Commercial traffic on the canal declined with the growth of the railways, and the last cargo boat passed through the flight in 1948. The canal fell into disrepair over the following decades until a long restoration campaign, carried out largely by volunteers from the 1960s onward, returned it to full working order; Queen Elizabeth II formally reopened the restored canal, including this flight, in 1990.

Getting there

The locks are about 2.2 km from Devizes; the nearest airport is Bournemouth Airport (BOH), about 65.0 km away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Wiltshire 5The Most Beautiful Places in England 93The Most Beautiful Places in the United Kingdom 154The Most Remarkable Canal Locks 8The Greatest Engineering Wonders in England 12The Greatest Engineering Wonders in the United Kingdom 23The Greatest Engineering Wonders 271

From the encyclopaedia

Caen Hill Locks are a flight of 29 locks on the Kennet and Avon Canal, between Rowde and Devizes in Wiltshire, England. Of the 107 locks on the canal, those at Caen Hill are numbered 22 to 50, and they are near the canal highpoint at Cadley Lock.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

51.35253, -2.02559per Wikidata