This Gateway to the Avon Booklet (link to PDF above and below) was published in 1971 by the Lower Avon Navigation Trust, Worcestershire at a cost of 25p. It covered the River Avon from Evesham down to Tewkesbury with detail of all the lock settings on the way. But note the book is sequenced travelling northwards from Tewkesbury to Evesham.
The
restoration of the Lower Avon was completed in 1962 whilst the Upper Avon was
not completed until 1974 when the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother opened it in
Stratford upon Avon on the 1st June 1974 with the restoration
extending up to Warwick.
Read
up details in the History Section on the Wikipedia Link below :-
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Avon,_Warwickshire
So read through this Gateway to the Avon Booklet to experience life over 50 years ago with all the old advertisements. It includes the total £77,862 restoration cost on Page 62 with the exact details of the expenditure on the previous pages. But the one thing that has always impressed me with this booklet are the full page diagrams of each of the lock settings. I believe it was these excellent diagrams that caused me never to throw this booklet away and the reason it is available today for me to digitise into a PDF to share with you. The booklet benefits from being digitised as a PDF in that you can now just scroll through all the pages. From Page 12 the text is structured into two columns. The left hand column is a tourist narrative on the local towns and villages listing some of the places of interest worth visiting. Whilst the right hand column is headed "Navigation Notes" with a distance in miles shown in the centre of the page from the Tewkesbury start point. These Navigation Notes include all the instructions and warnings as you navigate up the River Avon from the boat owners perspective. Being able to now scroll through this journey now makes for a very satisfying experience with it being better than when it was in a stapled book format.
On some of the scanned images you can on some pages see the rust marks left by the booklet's original steel staples which was its original binding technique. For those interested in marginalia like me go to page 68 where the day, number of hours and location have been noted. This looks like the journey times of the booklet owner who appears to have started from Upton on Severn on the River Severn. The total journey time to Stratford upon Avon being 27 hours of travelling time. Marginalia was a very important element within the Domesday Book. (1086). When searching for secondhand books the ones that appeal to me are the ones where the previous owner(s) have made copious notes all over the books pages. Reading these give you an insight into the readers thought processes.
For those interested in marginalia use the link below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalia
It is noted that the Copyright of the publisher, The Avon Navigation Trust, is legally acknowledged and that it is shared here on behalf of the publisher based upon a Creative Commons 4.0 Licence defined by a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed to the intellectual benefit of the Avon Navigation Trust.
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