Fourteen Locks Canal Centre — Attraction in Newport

A fellow still furloughed was discussing how he was going to relax today, on the radio, by heading down to Fourteen Locks in Newport. BBC Radio 6 listeners are an eclectic mix so my interest was piqued (particularly if there's a nice ramble, lots of good old fashioned engineering and a cafe with coffee on the agenda) and we decided to ditch the Cotswolds in favour of a tow path walk instead. Skimming the reviews it's easy to ignore the ignorant (comments like "the locks aren't even working" still bewilder me when you can look them up on Wikipedia in 10 seconds and find that the restoration of locks 17 to 20 cost a mere £700,000 of Heritage Lottery funding) and see how popular and beautiful this walk and locks are. There is a lot of overgrown vegetation but several of the stretches are good enough to attract wildfowl (2 lovely swans and their cygnets, moorhens, etc.) and there's lots of flora to admire (the jumping jack is very pretty but remember that it's a bit of an invasive species as far as the RHS is concerned along watersides in the UK). I'm always in awe of the engineers of the industrial revolution and how fast they could knock out significant structures - this 1.5 mile 14 lock run took a mere 3 years to build (compare this to a local project in my area to replace a single railway bridge that is now being estimated to take about the same time, already managed to ground a vehicle dragging a bridge section in and whose engineers have just realised the water pumps won't be big enough to remove predicted rainfall from settling under it). Anyway a lovely walk finished off with ice cream in the cafe. It'll be even better when they've restored all 14 locks - if I'm still...

Our first time in visiting Fourteen Locks in over 20 years and what a great walk and what a great day. It was £1.50 for 4 hours of parking there's a pay as you park machine and you can use NFC. Inside the centre there is a coffee shop, a little shop, a visitor's desk and I could see some other rooms. There were also some public toilets however these were quite tired and not great. In the toilet that we used the seat wasn't even attached to the toilet. They do sell duck food. £1.50 a bag but had sold out. On coming out of the centre we followed the path around the right of the small pond and then started walking down the left hand side of the locks. Please don't expect to come here and see a long waterway route. There is some water at the top of the locks but the further down you go the drier it becomes, however it was very picturesque. We decided when we got to the bottom of the path where it branches to the left or the right to go left and follow the path underneath the M4 motorway and then we bared round the left again heading towards the malpas junction. 2/3 of the way down we spotted a sign for the Allt Yr Yn nature reserve and branched off there to have a little nose, before making our way back the Canal Centre. We stopped off at the coffee shop and enjoyed a latte and cappuccino and a large glass of tap water. They sell hot and cold food and there is also a chiller fridge with cold drinks. All very reasonable priced and lovely service...

Very disappointed, but maybe I should have done more research in advance. You won't see any boats here-the locks are all abandoned and most are in a state of disrepair. They are also very deep, so keep hold of young kids who have a sense of adventure.

There are some pleasant walks, but we attempted the 'circular' Walk which was signposted about as well as the route the Apollo space rockets took to the moon. We had a downloaded map but still ended up walking across a golf course and then down a fairly busy country road as we couldn't find the route which went past the two reservoirs. Our circular walk took about 3 hours, but at least the weather was nice. Other than the locks being all busted up, the place seems to be kept up together. Free car park, visitors centre (which was sadly closed by the time we'd finished the walk) and gravelled footpaths. No dog poop, which was good.

The walk down by the M4 is a bit noisy, but you get to see bits of the M4 you might not have seen before.

If you want to see locks in action, you're better off heading to Wiltshire. If you want to see empty, broken locks, then...