Bishops Cannings

Coordinates: 51°22′37″N 1°56′49″W / 51.377°N 1.947°W / 51.377; -1.947

Bishops Cannings is a village and civil parish in the Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire, England, about 3 miles (5 km) northeast of Devizes. The parish includes the village of Coate and the hamlets of Bourton, Horton and Little Horton.

Geography

Streams which become the Salisbury Avon flow through the parish. The northern part of the parish lies on the Marlborough Downs, including Morgan's Hill and part of Roundway Hill.

Bishops Cannings village is about 0.5 miles (0.80 km) south of the A361 road which links Devizes with Avebury and Swindon.

History

The manor of Cannings was recorded in the 1086 Domesday Book as held by the Bishop of Salisbury.

Horton is first attested in 1158. The place-name is a common one in England and derives from Old English horu 'dirt' and tūn 'settlement, farm, estate', presumably meaning 'farm on muddy soil'.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Bourton manor was an estate of the Ernle family. The manor included the hamlet of Easton; today the name survives only at Easton Farm and Easton Down.

Coate Water Country Park

Coate Water (grid reference SU188820) is a country park situated 5 km (3.1 mi) to the southeast of central Swindon, England, near junction 15 of the M4. It takes its name from its main feature, a reservoir originally built to provide water for the Wilts & Berks Canal.

The reservoir formed a 70-acre (280,000 m²) lake, built in 1822 by diverting the River Cole. Its primary purpose was to provide water for the canal and it remained outside the borough of Swindon until the borough's expansion in 1928.

In 1914, with the canal abandoned, Coate became a Pleasure Park; changing rooms and a wooden diving board were added. In 1935 the wooden diving platform was replaced with a 33 ft (10 m) high concrete platform in an Art Deco style which has been praised by English Heritage and, although swimming in the lake has been prohibited since 1958, it was given Grade II listed protection in 2013. Now named officially named Coate Water Country Park, the lake is both a leisure facility and a nature reserve.

List of ridable miniature railways

A ridable miniature railway (USA: 'riding railroad' or grand scale railroad) is a ground-level, large scale model railway that hauls passengers using locomotives that are models of full-sized railway locomotives (powered by diesel or petrol engines, live steam engines or electric motors).

Overview

Typically miniature railways have a rail track gauge between 5 in (127 mm) and 18 in (457 mm), though both larger and smaller gauges are used.

These large model railroads are most often seen in urban parks or in commercial settings, such as amusement park rides.

The major distinction between a miniature railway and a narrow gauge railway is that miniature lines use models of full-sized prototypes. There are miniature railways that run on gauges as wide as the 2 ft 6 in (762 mm) gauge on the defunct Disneyland Viewliner, or as wide as the 2 ft (610 mm) gauge on the operating Wicksteed Park Railway. There are also narrow gauge railways running on extremely narrow track as small as 15 in (381 mm) gauge or less, for example the Rudyard Lake Steam Railway, Perrygrove Railway and the Eaton Hall Railway. These are known as minimum gauge railways.