The park that used to be on a waterway

In my last post, I mentioned I'd lost some photos that would help me tell you about another of those pieces of local history I so enjoy rooting out. Luckily, I hadn't lost them at all, and found them on my tablet, which I happened to have with me when I was walking in the park mentioned in this post's title. I don't usually take photos with my tablet; actually, I don't normally carry it around with me either, but I probably didn't want to leave it in the car.

Why I was walking in the Koning Willem 1 Park in Terneuzen is easily explained, but not very interesting, so I shan't bore you with the details. Suffice to say I was doing some 'big' washing in the 'big machines at the garage, and the park was nearby which gave me the opportunity to go for a walk while I waited.

It's not the first time I've ventured into it, and I've wondered before why it was so long and narrow. I even thought it might have been a canal at one time. Well, I wasn't far wrong.

Terneuzen's history is long. It started life with the name Ter Nose and has always been associated with shipping. For centuries, it has been the entry port for ships travelling along the canal to Ghent, but it was only in the mid-19th century that it was fortified. The photo below shows the fortifications that still existed in 1955 but have now been replaced by the huge harbour that leads to the great sea locks separating the estuary from the canal. 

What interested me was the fact that the red dot on the maps shows where I was standing when I took my photo of these information boards. If you look at where the dot is on the 1955 map, you can see it used to be the side of a closed harbour and what the information board tells me is that it was one of the ramparts of the old fortifications.

In the second image (see below), you can see a photo of the harbour the Koning Willem 1 park replaced before the major restructuring and as always, I wish I could have seen the city as it used to be with its moated fortifications and numerous inner docks. I could just imagine standing where I was and looking into a beautiful tree-lined harbour instead of along this long, narrow park .

Today, Terneuzen's port is incredibly impressive. The sea locks are massive, and in fact, they are busy building an even bigger one now, which has resulted in the demolition of a shipyard we used to use for the Hennie H's lift out. 

The Ghent-Terneuzen Canal has been widened significantly three times, but it has had other widenings as well, and there may be more to come now the new lock is being built. What changes this will mean to the life and industry along the canal are difficult to predict, but business rules and Ghent is an important inland port.

Below are some photos I took a while ago of the outer harbour where the ships enter and leave the locks when coming from (or heading to) the North Sea, the Channel and the Westerscheld estuary.

Meanwhile, we have just had our Hennie H at a shipyard along this same canal at a place called Sluiskil. She was due for her six-yearly lift out and inspection and our normal yard at Zelzate had no room for us. As a result, we mixed it with the big boys this time and spent four days on the slipway in company with a monster dumb barge, a Belgian commercial barge and another vessel whose purpose we couldn't quite make out. It looked like a pusher, but it had a catamaran hull, so it couldn't actually have pushed anything. There was also a huge sea ship in the dry dock.  

The view from the slipway was fabulous, and I took lots of photos when I should have been working. Luckily, the inspection was a breeze, the Hennie H passed with flying colours and the yard staff did the painting of the hull for us (something we normally do ourselves but weren't allowed to here), so we had a pretty easy time of it overall. 

After a short glitch this morning when the engine refused to start, Koos managed to get it going by bleeding the system, and we made our way the five kilometres back along the canal again to Sas van Gent. The starting issue will need investigation, but for now, we are glad to be back with a clean bill of Hennie H health. Below are some of the photos I took. The first was on Monday when we went up, the only cloudy day we had. Otherwise, the weather was gorgeous.

So that's it for this week allemaal. I hope you're all having a good one and that life is being kind to you wherever you are.