Nick, Droitwich Spa, Droitwich Canal

I gave five years of my life to this canal, and it's a huge sense of achievement that's deeply personal. I do feel very proud, and I get emotional talking about it.

I was one of the earliest volunteers involved in digging out the derelict canal in Droitwich. In 1981 when I started you wouldn't know the canal was ever here, it was just a flat field where I'm standing on now. The only thing we could see was the Barge Lock, so we started there!

We started digging it out and kept finding more bits of canal to follow. Nobody really had any photographs of the old canal to guide us, so it was great fun navigating and digging the route back out. We tried to restore the canal to its original plan as much as we could - for example when we discovered old bits of a swing bridge here, we replaced it on the same site as the original.

When I was working on the restoration I was in my early twenties. It was a great experience working with different types of people of all ages on such an enormous challenge. I'm nearly 60 now and when I look back on my life I think, "I learned how to do 'that' when I was working on canals".

Nick, Droitwich Spa, Droitwich Canal