On a cold winter’s morning, with a sharp frost pricking my face and a thick white mist draining the colour from the landscape, it felt as if I’d arrived at the end of the earth.

In fact, this thriving community of red-brick houses and colour-washed cottages lies on the outskirts of Savernake Forest, just a few miles south of the Marlborough Downs. Beyond the tight roller-coaster of hump-backed bridges that links the village to the nearby Kennet and Avon canal, I stamped about on the wharf in the forlorn hope of coaxing some blood back into my frozen limbs.

It was tempting to start walking here, pounding the canal towpath as it slips westwards through Bedwyn’s back yards. But, instead, I wanted to see one of the most eccentric collections in Britain, tucked away in the heart of the village. Not for the faint-hearted, Lloyd’s stone museum is a flamboyant extravaganza; a charming village house almost entirely submerged beneath a complete kit of parts for a decent-sized Victorian cemetery.

John Lloyd, whose family has run the village stonemason’s for seven generations, explains how his ancestors settled here after helping to build the canal at the end of the eighteenth century. The collection came later, he told me, starting with two big plaster friezes that came back from the Great Exhibition of 1851. The firm had no use for them says John, so they put them on the side of the house. As you do.

John’s grandfather added a couple of apprentice pieces. Years later his father, Benjamin, put most of the memorials on the front wall, along with anything else that was “a bit too interesting or novel”. John points across the yard to a three-foot high confection near the gate. “I put the pineapple up, just on the corner there,” he says carelessly, much as you or I might nip out and plant a few bulbs.

Leaving the village through the swirling mists of St Mary’s churchyard, I rejoined the canal at Bedwyn Church Lock. The stillness was absolute, broken only by the deep, rhythmic woomph ... woomph ... of water surging and bubbling into the lock chamber like gases from a volcanic spring. A couple of dog walkers loomed out of the mist but, for the most part, I passed unnoticed up the locks towards Crofton pumping station.

If engineer John Rennie had got his way, the canal would have plunged into a long tunnel at Crofton. For two-and-a-half laborious miles, boatmen would have manhandled their craft through the darkness whilst their horses frolicked in the fresh air on the towpath above their heads. But the directors baulked at such an expensive project, opting instead for William Jessop’s proposal to carry the canal over the low hill at Burbage.

The problem, explained Ray Knowles, chairman of the canal trust’s Crofton branch, as he thrust a restorative mug of hot chocolate into my hand, was that Jessop’s scheme lifted the canal some forty feet above its natural water supply. Still, even with ten extra locks and a big, steam-operated pumping station, Jessop saved the canal company some £41,000.

Ray and his team spend the cold winter months maintaining Crofton’s two Cornish beam engines, which regularly relieve British Waterways’ electric pumps on summer weekends. The older of the two machines was installed in 1812 and, says Ray with evident pride, “it's the oldest working beam engine in the world. It’s still in its original building; still doing its original job.”

Nearby Wilton Water was also built to service the canal’s voracious appetite for water, but an easy stroll beside this charming reservoir reinforced my own craving for something rather more sustaining. The path led me straight to the tiny village of Wilton for a lunchtime rendezvous at The Swan. Over a plate of home-made duck sausages, I settled into conversation with John Talbot, an active member of the village windmill society.

Like Wilton Water, the windmill owes its existence to the canal, which re-routed the River Bedwyn and robbed the local water mills of their power supply. The mill, says John, is great fun – and the annual summer open day is a major event in the village calendar. “All the children get involved, all the families. Everybody comes up to help … it's great!”

After lunch, we plodded steadily up the short hill for a closer look at the sturdy brick tower that has dominated the local landscape since 1821. Flour was ground here for roughly a hundred years, John told me, after which the great sails hung motionless until Wiltshire County Council bought the mill and restored it to working order in the 1970s. Under the wide sky a hundred feet above the village, it’s easy to catch his enthusiasm for this early example of renewable energy.

We said our goodbyes as the thin afternoon sunshine faded from the long misty ridges to the south. I set off past Hillbarn Farm up the forest road through Bedwyn Brail, a remnant of Le Broyle, one of the five bailiwicks of Savernake Forest. It was fast, easy walking; but, even so, the lights had come on in Brail Farm before I cleared the woods and dropped down to the canal at Great Bedwyn.

Back at the wharf, the morning’s puddles were still frozen solid.

© David Foster 2006