On the Water - by Gale Pitt

500 Extra Large Piece Puzzle - 680mm x 485mm

Box Dimensions - 410mm x 290mm x 50mm

Canals first saw use during the Roman occupation of Great Britain, and were used mainly for irrigation. However, the Romans did create several navigable canals to link rivers, enabling increased transportation inland by water Great Britain's navigable waterway network was steadily increased, but grew massively in the 18th century as the demand for industrial transport increased. The canals were key to the pace of the Industrial Revolution: roads at the time were unsuitable for large volumes of traffic. As the Industrial Revolution took hold in the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, the canals enjoyed great success and underwent various technological changes. Early canals "contoured" round hills and valleys, later ones went straighter, as locks took them up and down hills, and the more modern canals strode across valleys on taller and longer aqueducts and through hills in longer and deeper tunnels. However, from the mid 19th century, railways began to replace canals. As trains, and later road vehicles, became more advanced, they became more economically viable than canal boats, being faster, cheaper to run, and able to carry much larger cargoes. The canal network declined, and many canals were bought by railway companies. Narrow canals became unusable, filled with weeds, silt and rubbish, or converted to railways. The network of canals has been reclaimed and cleaned out for those tourists and wayfarers looking to a slower more comtempaltive means of transportation; often experiencing old England's less well known charms.

Gale Pitt has been a freelance artist since the Seventies. She has sold her originals and licensed her pictures of a wide variety of subjects to companies in the USA, Europe and the antipodes. She has been particularely successful in her work for decorative tin boxes and jigsaw puzzles. From her home in London, she has travelled to forty different coutries, gathering materials for her work and promoting it at International Trade Fairs.

Gale paints pictures of ballooning, beaches, flight, fantasy, doll houses, gardens, cats and dogs, and any thing or creature requested.