First is the German Wheel, two metal hoops six feet in circumference, joined at six points. Inside, gymnast Chris Lashua rolls, turns and spins through a series of gravity-defying somersaults and acrobatics.

The slimy little causeway had dropped into the river by a slow process of suicide, and two or three stumps of piles and a rusty iron mooring-ring were all that remained of the departed Break-Neck glories. … [T]hrough three-fourths of its rising tides the dirty indecorous drab of a river would come solitarily oozing and lapping at the rusty ring, …

, Scene 1: That daughter there of Spain, the Lady Blanch, / Is near to England: look upon the years / Of Lewis the Dauphin and the lovely maid. / If lusty love should go in quest of beauty, / Where should he find it fairer than in Blanch?

Hard work is required from men and machines as I was to experience later when footplating Lambton No 5 on five bogies battling its way up Newtondale.