Isn’t it odd where life takes you?

Ten years ago, I was looking forward to a gentle retirement from my job at the Office for National Statistics after seventeen years of being broken down by age and sex (that’s a statistician’s joke!) Then one day I was invited to go for a walk with some friends in the Scottish Borders and, as they say, my life was never the same again.

On that summers afternoon in 2014 we headed from Ancrum village up through woodland onto the long natural escarpment of Lilliards Edge, to a place called Gersit Law. As we emerged from the woodland, ahead of us stood a massive stone monument, largely covered in ivy and topped by a domed roof with dozens of glass stars cut into the stone. Walking around the perimeter it was obvious that the place had seen better days. Grass and weeds to head height made it difficult to see what the building had been, the gates were hanging off their hinges and a door lay open at the foot of the building. What was this place? We pushed through the weeds, and were confronted by a lion, fortunately made of stone, glowering at us through the thicket.  Squeezing through the old door we were standing by a stone sarcophagus, guarded at each end by huge carved statues of angels. Above us pale green light filtered down from the stars in the towering roof. The moment was only slightly spoiled by the thick carpet of bird guano in which we were now standing, with a smell to match! “Someone really should be looking after this place, it’s amazing” said I, little knowing the consequences which were to follow. That evening, after a good supper, we decided to set up the Friends of the Monteath Mausoleum to “look after the place” and perhaps even restore it to former glory.

To cut a long story short, we did just that. After a four-year struggle, we finally got the funding in place for full restoration, which was completed in 2019. The Monteath Mausoleum, built in 1864, now stands proudly on top of Gersit Law, ready for the next 150 years.

Readers may be thinking that I’m one of those people who “just does that sort of thing” but they would be quite wrong. Embarking on the restoration of the mausoleum was a journey into the unknown for all of us, and we wouldn’t have succeeded without a lot of help and some good fortune. But having been confronted with the possibility of saving this magnificent building, it seemed to me that it was at least worth trying, and I had some previous form in this area.

Back in the 1970’s, as a student in south London I became involved with the restoration of the Basingstoke Canal which runs through the heart of rural Surrey. There was nothing glamorous about it, a group of enthusiasts would turn up on a wet Saturday morning, someone would hand you a spade and say “dig that gulley out”. I remember a conversation with one of my fellow volunteers, when having cleared a section of towpath behind some houses, one of the residents came out to remonstrate about our efforts. “We don’t want this XXXX! canal opened again, we want it filled in, it’s an eyesore!” As he departed, I asked my friend “Do we have permission from the canal owners to do this work?” He shrugged, “I doubt it, nobody will admit to owning it. So, we just started, and we’ll go on until somebody stops us”. In the event, what stopped the Basingstoke Canal reaching its original terminus was not the people or bureaucracy, but the bats in Greywell Tunnel. That is another story, but no matter, today the majority of the canal is now open and much loved by visitors and residents alike.

Some years later, I volunteered for the restoration of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. This was a very different beast, a massive 21-mile-long canal with a 3-mile tunnel in the middle, owned by British Waterways and supported by all but one local authority along its entire route. The problem here was that full restoration was deemed impossible. Some sections had been infilled and built over, some had been obliterated by farming, and one section had an industrial estate built on top of it. Oh, and the tunnel was completely clogged with silt!

Undaunted, with the support of the Inland Waterways Association and an ambitious local canal society, people turned up from all over the country and started to dig. And dig. And dig. My stint was in the 1980’s around Stalybridge and Slaithwaite, at a time when the “impossible” sections still looked impossible, but we kept on digging. Gradually some of the old locks re-emerged, sections were re-watered, towpaths restored, trees were planted.

By the time I drifted away from canals in the early 1990’s new sources of funding had begun to appear, bringing with them serious amounts of money. English Partnerships cleared much of the “new” building off the line of the canal, and the Millennium Fund paid for new tunnels to be installed beneath the industrial estate. The impossible gradually being made possible. The Huddersfield Narrow Canal was finally completed and re-opened to the public in 2001.

And the point of these stories?

In general terms, if something is worth doing, gather good people around you, and just start. See if anyone stops you. They may well, and may have good reason to do so, but if you never start you will never know. Give it a go!

Secondly, just because something is impossible today, it may not be impossible forever. While many a scheme has foundered on over-ambitious goals, many more have failed through lack of ambition. When we started the restoration of Monteath Mausoleum, none of us had any real idea of what was involved or where the money would come from. But we could cut the grass and get rid of the ivy. We could make contact with the owners and other stakeholders. We could listen to the advice of those with experience and seek out sources of funding. We could manage the budgets and call on the knowledge of experts. Finally, we could stay with the project until it was completed. The journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.

Which reminds me, wasn’t I going to have a gentle retirement at some time?