Nearly 200 years after Beniamin Lloyd erected a plaque naming Bruce Tunnel over the Kennet & Avon canal, his great great great great grandson, John Lloyd, has reproduced the inscription for the tunnel.

The new plaque will not replace the original, which remains in place above the tunnel entrance, but sits alongside it. It is not, however, the same stone nor the same dimensions.

Beniamin cut his inscription into a piece of Bristol Pennant nearly 5m wide by 1.8m high (or 16ft x 6ft, as he would have described it).

As John Lloyd, the seventh generation of his family to run the stonemasonry business in Great Bedwyn in Wiltshire, could not source a piece of Bristol Pennant, he produced his plaque in a smaller piece of imported Pietra Serena. It is 2.4m wide and almost 1m high and set into a Bath stone frame.

In fact there are two new plaques that have been produced by John Lloyd, the second in slate that sits underneath the main plaque explaining why it is there. It reads: "This monument was erected by the Kennet & Avon Canal Partnership and John Lloyd, seventh generation mason of Bedwyn, as a replica of that erected by his ancestor, Beniamin Lloyd, mason of Bedwyn to the Kennet & Avon Canal Company, AD 2003."

The main plaque reads: "The Kennet & Avon Canal Company inscribe this tunnel with the name Bruce in testimony of their gratitude for the uniform and effectual support of the Right Honourable Thomas Bruce, Earl of Aylesbury, and Charles Lord Bruce, his son, through the whole progress of this great national work by which a direct connection by water was opened between the cities of London and Bristol anno domini 1810."

The erection of the plaque marks the end of a project that stretches back to 1961, when the Inland Waterways Development Committee of the time recommended the canal should be restored.

The task ahead was huge - 86 derelict locks, a leaking canal bed and crumbling bridges and aqueducts.

Various job creation schemes since the mid 1970s have helped the work progress and in 1990 the full length of the Kennet & Avon was re-opened for navigation by the Queen.

The late Brian Marsen of Bath Stone Group was an enthusiastic supporter of the canal restoration and carried his Bath stone along it from Limpley Stoke mine to Windsor Castle for repairs following the fire there in 1992.

In 1996 the Kennet & Avon Canal Partnership, which includes British waterways, was formed to safeguard the future of the canal, which was opened in 1810, just 31 years before the Great Western Railway was completed. The canal immediately started losing business to the railway.

In 1996 the Kennet & Avon Canal Partnership was awarded a £25million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, matched by the Partnership, to secure the structure, operation and environment of the canal to make it sustainable and accessible for current and future generations.

The raising of the new plaques on the Bruce tunnel was the final part of that project and to witness and report John Lloyd arriving at the bridge with the plaques (by barge, of course) were BBC South, HTV, Meridian TV, The Times newspaper, Daily Western Press, Newbury Weekly News and the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald.