The Crane River

July 28, 2023 6:24 AM

The Crane River winds gently through West London, from the vast concrete bulk of Twickenham Rugby Stadium, past the shot tower that is the last remnant of the vast gunpowder factory that lasted from 1776 to 1927 (blowing up 55 times), to the sunken Feltham Circles which are one of the few open graffiti walls in London. If you're lucky on your walk you can see seven species of bats, water voles, kingfishers, adders and eels, tawny owls and glow worms or Muntjac deer.
posted by TheophileEscargot (10 comments total)

(I've run there occasionally for years, but only saw Muntjac recently. It was astonishing to think, "huh, that brown dog looks kind of weird", then see another one, then realise that you're seeing wild deer crossing the path in a ribbon of green in the midst of a huge city.)
posted by TheophileEscargot at 6:49 AM on July 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

"huh, that brown dog looks kind of weird"

Oh yes. In my teens, we moved to a house that turned out to have muntjacs visiting the garden, and it took quite a while to stop making that mistake. Come to that, I had a similar reaction the first time I saw a hare, which was running full tilt towards me on a woodland path. "Yikes! Dog! *Weird* dog! ... Oh, hang on..."

Anyway, this is great! I don't live close enough to be able to go and walk along the Crane, but I'm glad to know it exists.

(And turning old gunpowder works into nature reserves seems to be a popular choice. Swords into ploughshares?)
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 9:15 AM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

My uncle worked in a gunpowder factory in North Wales, and being blown up seems to have been part of the job.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 9:55 AM on July 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

The popular Rivers of London urban fantasies first started me thinking about the lifecycles of all the much-interfered-with waterways through the city. There are characters in the books representing the spirits of the Thames (of course, both upper and lower), the Tyburn, Fleet, Lea, Beverly, Oxley, Effra, Brent, Ash, and Crane. I may have missed some? Anyway, there are a lot of rivers, creeks, brooks, and waterways through what is now metro London, and they all have interesting and convoluted histories.
posted by bgribble at 11:22 AM on July 28, 2023 [8 favorites]

the vast gunpowder factory that lasted from 1776 to 1927 (blowing up 55 times)

That reminds me of something that Terry Pratchett put in one of his books, about fireworks factories and dragon pens: very thick walls and very thin roofs.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:33 PM on July 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

(And turning old gunpowder works into nature reserves seems to be a popular choice. Swords into ploughshares?)

I bet it's something more like it not being worth trying to dig to develop anything on land that potentially has all kinds of long buried unstable exploding things in it.
posted by srboisvert at 1:44 PM on July 28, 2023

Video of muntjacs pulsing their horrible face holes is purest nightmare fuel. It's like they were designed by Rick Baker for an 80s horror movie.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:59 PM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Video of muntjacs pulsing their horrible face holes is purest nightmare fuel.

Had to Google this, and yeah...

Bonus - they have a truly heart warming call.
posted by MattWPBS at 2:47 PM on July 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

bgribble - there's also the River Roding with a trust founded by Paul Powlesland also the founder of Lawyers for Nature, a very brave lawyer making waves while representing trees and rivers, and probably making serious enemies.

Map of River Roding https://twitter.com/riverroding/status/1682377826572304384/photo/1 (link opens without signing in to twitter) and also Water mills of the River Roding and tributaries (21Mb pdf on .essexmills.org.uk) as a vector map.

I too initially became interested in London's ancient rivers while reading the Rivers of London series.
posted by unearthed at 2:55 PM on July 28, 2023

Wow. This is where I grew up and inherited my parents’ house nearby. The new extended river walk all the way from Twickenham station is really sweet and all the tidying up makes it a lot less scary that it used to be!

My mate fell in the river while we were skimming stones, that was amusing. The only other story I have is that we used the river water one night to mix mortar in order to build a small brick wall in our school’s driveway, having stolen all the bricks, sand and cement already. Great times.
posted by bookbook at 3:15 PM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]