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« July 2004 | Main | September 2004 »
Karen and Steve Bull have a plan to cycle from Burton to London, staying close to the waterways (and on the towpath, where possible/permissible), and want to spend the night in decent B&Bs on the way. They asked me if I know any canal guidebooks showing the locations of bed & breakfast close by the waterways.
The short answer is no. The longer answer is that I think it would be a splendid idea for the canal guides to list B&B places, but don't expect it any time soon.
An around-the-houses alternative is for Steve & Karen to carry a collection of the most comprehensive B&B guides with them - doing their own research, and annotating an existing canal guide. They could start with the Best Bed & Breakfast 2004, very much a personal choice of compilers Joanna Mortimer and Sigourney Welles, or the compendious but anonymous AA Bed & Breakfast Guide 2005.
Today from the outskirts of Rugeley to a mooring in Horninglow Basin for the IWA festival. Here's the route on Canalplan and Waterscape.
A day of many showers, broadening out into a gloriously sunsetted evening.
I can never pass Armitage without a schoolboy titter at the serried piles of loos and urinals ready for dispatch to the toilets and bathrooms of Britain from the Armitage Shanks factory.
This stretch, Stone to Wolseley, is midway between Preston Brook and Shardlow, the bookends of the Trent & Mersey canal. Here's the journey on Waterscape's route planner, and here's the passage on Canalplan. Incidentally, I do wish I could include a link that would decode automatically into an itinerary. I'm being ungrateful here, I guess. Both services are free, and there are no large teams of programmer-wallahs poised to serve my whim! Leastways, not for free. Although the TOWPATH TELEGRAPH tells me that Waterscape is reputed to farm out some of its programming to Bangalore, so in referring to 'programmer-wallahs' I might only be half-right here.
I did the passage through the Stone locks myself, Christine demanding her usual lie-in. I've given up mocking her for this; I've learned that in her work she normally rises before 6am, and a lie-in is chocolate compared to the all-bran of her normal workday rising. I can't remember the last time I fell asleep before 1am, nor the last time I was fully dressed before 8am.
On this stretch, I paused after the bottom lock to refill with water while Christine stocked up at Safeway. She returned laden with Morrison's bags, which I'm noting here as a record of its takeover of the Safeway group. It was exactly here that I also paused while on my way up in May.
Aston Lock is halfway alone the Trent & Mersey canal, and the milepost here reminds us.
Six hours of uneventful but enjoyable passage, chiefly held up by a pause at Sandon Lock. Here, we abutted onto a long queue delayed by a broken paddle on the upper part. By this I mean that of the two paddles (sluices) that let water in at the upper part, one was broken. The upshot is that the lock fills very slowly, and one sits and chafes and chomps at the bit as upcoming boats past through oh so slowly.
Great Haywood is always a joy. The roving bridge at the Junction never ceases to delight with the impossibly shallow arc of its span. The bridge is one of a handful of early-industrial bridges that confound your understanding of physics. How did they create a brick bridge with such an unnaturally low arch?
Two locks later, at 7pm, I was wondering about when to stop, when a shout from Wolseley Bridge gave me pause. Lo, it was Ray Bowern! He shouted down with both hands cupped, asking me when/where/whence we were bound, and I told him the IWA festival. He told me to make myself at home at Horninglow Basin, saying there was space next to a large Dutch barge. Presumably he'd just been driving across the bridge and had spotted me. I was flattered enough to be remembered that I decided we'd pause there for the night. It's great to be noticed and wanted!
Christine and I spent the evening at the local Wolesley Arms pub. It's said this has quite a history; whatever its past, it has a rather spare and echoey interior now, being extensively modernised. As someone said on :
www.beerintheevening.com:
You would have thought IKEA had furnished the place. Excuse me sir - Where do I pay for this light coloured, pretend wood and brass product?
They were rather less complimentary about the food, but as Chrissie and I only drank it's not fair to pass judgement.
I almost danced a spiral of delight when someone asked us if we had a light. Christine passed them her special lighter, last seen yesterday afternoon at Stoke on Trent, and everyone gained a laugh out of it. Well, we did anyway, even if the guy borrowing it didn't.
From Harecastle to Stone it was a day of great variety - and the Pearsons were canal companions once again! Michael and young Eden accompanied me from Kidsgrove, through the Harecastle tunnel, through the heart of the Potteries, and down as far as Stone bottom lock, where they jumped ship at 2.30pm, close by the station.
While I waited for the lock to be free I went below to brew up, and found Michael had discreetly left me a gift - a signed copy of 'Coming up with the goods', a book he wrote a little while back about travels through Britain by goods train. I've flattered him a lot recently about how well he writes, and how he ought to write the Tom Rolt book de nos jours. Well, on first browsing, I'd say Coming up with the goods is close to being a 'Narrow Boat' for the freight railways.
I went down the lock alone, and passed out through the bent temporary tunnel under the new A500 roadworks. More and more frequently these days, the canal tunnels they build are bent, and so it is here. None of these curved modern tunnels are double-width, and even if they were, no one would want to cross with another boat in them.
While I waited for the lock to be free I went below to brew up, and found Michael had discreetly left me a gift - a signed copy of 'Coming up with the goods', a book he wrote a little while back about travels through Britain by goods train. I've flattered him a lot recently about how well he writes, and how he ought to write the Tom Rolt book de nos jours. Well, on first browsing, I'd say Coming up with the goods is close to being a 'Narrow Boat' for the freight railways.
Christine arrived an hour or so later, and a little distraught. She showed me some photo-me machine photos she needed to register with an agency of some kind. She hated them. Were they awful?, she asked. What was I supposed to say? Well, yes!, I said. They made her look like Myra Hindley, which she doesn't.
Not much, anyway. So I proposed she burn them. Christine isn't the sort of girl to wear fuck me shoes, but she's quite happy to carry a 'fuck you' lighter, of which more tomorrow, and she got it out for the camera and made a distraught effort to burn the offending photos. The photos were half-burned when she dropped them in the water. She was much happier.
A short while later, seeing them still floating, her panic surfaced again, and she got out the boat hook to try to sink the offending evidence.
On the Meaford flight we met a couple who'd just rented a narrowboat from Stone and were late setting off. I lent them my copy of Pearson's 'Four Counties Ring' (the very one Michael had been updating yesterday) and we passed on happily smug that I'd done my day's good deed.
We spent a pleasant afternoon travelling to Stone, arriving at 7:30pm and mooring close by Roger Fuller's splendid pair of boats.
I didn't forget that it was Jenny's 55th birthday today. Happy Birthday, Jenny Wren.
Not actually UK-waterways related, but I can't resist passing on the results of Annual World Championship Boatyard Dog Trials in Rockland, Maine.
At the forthcoming Inland Waterways Festival at Burton-upon-Trent there's a dog display team, Paws for Thought which will demonstrate how dogs 'of uncertain pedigree'. such as strays, can be trained. But there's not a Boater's Dog competition as such, and I reckon there ought to be.
Here's how Rockland Habor did it...
Continue reading "Boatyard Dog Trials - dog owners found guilty (of cheating!) " »
Middlewich to Red Bull today, climbing towards the Potteries. And today I was delighted to be accompanied by Michael Pearson and his son Eden.
Pearson publishes the eponymous Canal Companion series, which has been guiding UK canal boaters for two decades. There were and are many other guides, but what struck me immediately about the Pearson guides was the story he tells - it's more than the simple catalogue of sights that other guides give - and the colourful, diagrammatic maps. I sent complimentary letters, and have exchanged emails in the last couple of years, and finally my passage through Cheshire and the Potteries coincided with his need for an update of the Four Counties Ring.
I apologised to Michael for been very talkative, and he said that's fine, because he and Eden wouldn't talk much, and indeed they didn't. He's taciturn and prefers to watch and listen. I wish I could learn that habit. It's probably why he's so informed about the history of the waterways. When I have the potential to hear something interesting, I'm too busy telling others what they need to know.
I did listen enough to learn a lot from Michael, and I bounced a lot of questions off him. He brought a current edition of his book and scribbled copious notes on it, most notably marking the famous Trent & Mersey mileposts which aren't in earlier editions. (milestone photo here was stolen from here)
Just discovered a sixth boating blog, one that appears to have started on July 1st. And after several weeks of regular - almost daily - updates and a near-full range of features, Retirement With No Problem is looking very impressive. This is an excellent example of a cruising blog, showing what can be achieved with the format. I'm jealous!
Sue & Vic are early retirees, cruising and living continously on their narrowboat No Problem. Sue is the writer, updating the crusing log daily, with regular photos embedded in the posts, and an archive of photo albums divided into months, going back to last October. The posts are succinct and convey overall impressions, vignettes and word images. She avoids falling into the trap of tediously cataloging the day's events, and is thus a great read.
The site uses Blogger, and you can see the system's neat features staring out at you - very entertaining and attractive. There's a neat, live, 'where are we now' map, and lots of photos. A caption at the top of the 'archives' section says "Archives from 2003-2004 will be available soon". If that was a previous blog, or even a website, I missed it. However, I can't find a webfeed (RSS), so I can't get my computer to fetch the daily postings automatically. Sue also has a Guestbook but, more usefully, you can add your own comments to individual posts, one of the essences of a good blog that gives it an interactive 'community' feel.
Snecklifter, take note - No Problem is hard on your heels!
'Morecambe Today' reports today (when else?) that a new packet boat has started operating on the Lancaster Canal, between Carnforth and Lancaster.
According to the story, the main mover behind this service is, strangely, a bike hire company called Budgie Bikes, although that link isn't operational yet. See www.cyclepoint.co.uk for more information about Budgie, whose orange machines are apparently (I've never been there) a familiar sight around Lancaster.
Packet boats in the old canal days were the express non-stop services, used for passengers and perishable cargoes. They were also known as fly boats, and they certainly flew, by modern canal standards, and indeed in the pre-railway era. Some would regularly top a nose-bleeding 10mph. Most famous, perhaps, were the old Shropshire Fly Boats.
Modern canal passage is nowadays called 'the fastest way to slow down', and Swiftsure, for all its streamlined name, will never exceed BW's sedate 4mph limit. I hope not, anyway, or there'll be quite a few unhappy private moorers on the upper reaches of the Lancaster Canal.
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