Be prepared

Be prepared - even for canoes in the lock

I like to think we are prepared for most eventualities on Tug Harry but getting tangled up with a gang of Venture Scouts on the Leicester section locks was something new.
We met them at the first of the big, double locks that are now the trademark of the canal as it winds down from the final tunnel and heads into Leicester and the River Soar.
The scouts had come from Leicester for a weekend's 'venturing' and were portaging their canoes and kit around the first lock but with four more to go we decided that if we could lock with plastics on the Thames, we could lock with canoes on the cut. So from then on they piled in with us and those not in boats became an eager gang of lockwheelers.
If I were a scout leader on a field trip around water with a dozen teenagers – most on their first canoe outing – I reckon I'd need a hefty dose of Valium to see me through but these leaders were remarkably calm and the kids were having a ball without ever getting out of line. A good bunch to spend a Saturday afternoon boating with.

One of the narrow, reedy tight bends on this stretch

Before we'd reached the locks we'd gone through some of the most winding, narrow and shallow sections of the canal. Hard to imagine it was originally planned as a major line from Leicester through to Northampton to join the Grand Union. Like a lot of these schemes did, it ran out of money and stopped just short of Foxton. Enough was raised to take it on to Market Harborough five miles away but no further. And then some more cash was drummed up to take it on a new line through Foxton and Watford to Norton Junction. Except this stretch had narrow locks.
That meant there was a Watford Gap before ever there was an M1 motorway. Widebeam boats couldn't connect from south to north – and they still can't. Which some of us narrowboaters think is a Good Thing.
But the line to Market Harborough still exists. It nearly didn't but the first campaigning rally of the new Inland Waterways Association was held there back in 1950 to save it and rekindle interest in the moribund canal system.

Market Harborough basin, a model of regeneration

The old canal basin was to remain semi-derelict for another fifty years but is now a model of regeneration with a hire boat base, offices, flats and a bar all built in the old buildings and some well matched new ones. It's tidy, boaty and busy – way different to those all to common sterile blocks of canalside apartments that pay no more than lip service to being 'waterside'.
The canal that reaches it is almost river like: winding, wide and edged with reeds and weeds – save for a smelly passage past a 'meat rendering' works. Then it turns past the sizeable gardens of substantial pre-war homes toward the basin. We had spent a couple of days exploring this very likeable small town. The handsome main street has retained many of its handsome old Georgian shop and office frontages and the place feels affluent without being pretentious. In a smart planning move the town has also located all its supermarkets together in one town centre site to keep the centre alive. Sainsburys, Waitrose, Aldi and Lidl all sit there cheek by jowl. And living next door to its posh neighbour has clearly rubbed off on Aldi – it's the poshest one we've ever seen. Even the jumble sale aisle of bargain buys are all neatly folded and stacked.

Brian takes a final sniff at the bone crushing plant

But after the bustle of a town – our first since, oh, way back in the Midlands, we headed off towards our day of Venturing. Via a final overnight stop at the bottom of Foxton locks and a visit to the great little Bridge 61 pub there. It's a great pub: sat in the centre of one of the area's biggest tourist attractions it still manages to have the cosy feel of a village local. It's tiny and busy but full of charm. And it serves decent Adnams beer. We stopped for a pint and ended up having two – plus a couple of plates of sausages and onions in giant Yorkshire puddings. You have to be prepared don't you.
And finally...we first saw this boat at Streethay, then a couple of years later semi-sunk at Milton Keynes and now four more years on, being refitted by a couple at Debdale Wharf up here. Originally a hire boat and over 30 years old, it'll soon be a classic.

From 1980s hire boat, via a sinking to a floating home

Tempted by a boat and lured by a canal

Early morning temptation, this Simon Wain seventy footer

We woke up at Norton Junction, looked outside and both remarked on how handsome the big 70ft boat moored across the water was.
Two hours later we had nearly bought it!
The boat belonged to our mate from the Tollhouse. Tony buys and sells boats so anything he owns is up for sale. At the right price. Tony is also a delightful, patrician charmer who knows plenty about boats and even more about selling them. His patter is so smooth it melts in your brain. Not for nothing do we call him 'Swiss Tony' after the legendary Fast Show character.
"Everyone should own a 70ft boat at some time in their lives," he enthused. "And this one is proper. You won't find one like it these days. Simon (Wain) built it and hardly builds these days, Roger (Fuller) has given up, so has Graham (Edgson). It's too expensive; there's no money in it." You'll notice that Tony calls everyone by their christian names.
Trouble was, it was hard to disagree with anything he said. The boat was great: acres of space, handsome lines, a lovely JP2M engine, a fine back cabin ("look at that scumbly-wumbly"). We wanted it but we didn't want it. Why did we need a 70ft boat? We didn't. Tony agreed: we didn't need it. Which only made us want it more.

Sense prevails and we head in Watford locks in Harry

Then the dead hand of commonsense prevailed. We decided to go off and have a think – and fortunately perhaps got ourselves lost in the enchanting Leicester Section. It's about eight years since we came this way so we'd forgotten pretty much all of it bar its famous Foxton Lock flight of staircase locks and Foxton's less famous but arguably more charming smaller brother, the Watford flight. Watford of Gap fame, that is. Between the two is 20 miles of rural bliss; the canal only touches the edge of one modest village, Crick, and otherwise secrets itself in the undulating countryside of Leicestershire where sheep and cattle graze on the gentle slopes. It's utterly delightful, the more so for being so empty of boats.
When we were last here the villagers of Yelvertoft were up in arms about plans for a big new marina and, worse, applications for several windfarms in the area – all cunningly put in my different developers to different councils. The marina is now built and doesn't seem to have impacted on life and there's at least one windfarm, which is probably one too many for the locals.
We moored and walked down the short Welford Arm, like everywhere busier than I recall it, and then headed via the three-quarter mile Husbands Bosworth tunnel to Foxton. The Leicester is certainly a cure for tunnel-phobia – there are three, the longest being the 1500 yarder of Crick. Fortunately all are two-way so they lack the smokey claustrophobia of narrower ones.

And down the Foxton locks in the rain

The weather was the only thing spoiling our fun: it was grim. Wet and cold. The lockies at Foxton were hoping for a break in the warm. Then we arrived. Sorry! Foxton's two five-lock staircases are too complicated to be left to boaters (well they're not really but the price of a mistake could be the flooding of two houses and a pub.) It's a fiendishly clever set-up: one paddle sends water out of the lock into a big side pond while the next paddle reclaims it to fill the next lock down. In theory then a boat goes all the way down using up just one lock's worth of water.

The remains of the Inclined Plane from above

And from the old feeder canal at the base

It takes time, though – about 45 minutes – and when someone's coming down, no-one can go up. Which means queues and these days that demands lockies as referees. In the working boat days it probably meant rows and fist fights. Little wonder that they built the Inclined Plane around the corner to haul boats up and down in ten minutes. A boat was loaded into an iron tank or 'caisson' and hauled up using steam power and the counter-balancing weight of a boat coming down.
Unfortunately it wasn't reliable, cost a lot to run and the queues just re-formed at the Watford Locks which weren't improved so the Plane was abandoned and sold for scrap. Its remains can still be seen. What a tourist attraction a new one would be, they say. Hmmm. I'm inclined to think there are enough visitors there already and coachloads of trippers might just spoil the charm of this quiet country canal.

Enjoying an English summer!

Josher Emu passes us en route to Braunston

First we spent a few days sweltering in thirty plus degrees heat – that's 90+ degrees in the sort of old money that we pensioners still prefer. Now we are enduring little more than half that temperature and miserable drizzle to boot.
But, as they say, what would we English talk about round the locks if it wasn't the weather.
After hiding under the shade of a tree in Whittington for a couple of days waiting for Mrs B's emergency dental treatment, we pottered gently down towards Braunston in the company of various working boats all going to the same destination as us – the annual Boat Rally there.
We are a bit over-familiar with the route. It was the scene of our first ever canal boat owning journey ten years ago; a race against winter closures which turned into a race against winter itself as snow fell and the canals iced up.
The Coventry Canal hasn't really changed. The eleven spaced out Atherstone locks felt familiar and busy too. Nuneaton was an unchanging dump – a cameo of life there being the sight of two blokes swigging lager and fishing while a year old in a pushchair gazed blankly at an iPad: daddy day-care, Nuneaton style, while Charity Dock is still the same shambolic crazy mess of junk, rubbish and weird statues. I hope Nuneaton changes but Charity Dock never does.
We moored near Hawkesbury Junction where the Coventry meets the northern Oxford Canal. Moored behind us was a working boat en route to the show. Or rather half of one as it turned out. The owner had bought the front half of 'Gorse' and built a suitable cabin to match it to. Somewhere, it seems, is another owner with the original back half and a new front!
The northern Oxford, with its long straights, is rarely interesting but it still has memories for us of entertaining stops in pubs and a near flooding of Harry when Seadog Brian got on a worktop and knocked a tap on. No such incidents this time. We did see yet another monster marina under construction in this always crowded area though.
Braunston was inevitably doomed to be busy so we pulled up as soon as we saw moored boats – and left ourselves a half a mile walk through one of the most overgrown and crumbling away towpaths I've experienced. Down at Braunston Turn we passed the sad remnants of a burnt out Sea Otter – these are built in aluminium and so when they burn, they melt. There was virtually nothing left!

Not just burnt out but melted; the remains of a Sea Otter

I do like a crusty boat show. Last year we went to Lymm where boats, cars and traction engines provide the full classic transport experience). Braunston sticks to boats but there are more of them and the canal parade is a kind of vaguely organised chaos as boats attempt a circuit via a three-point turn at Braunston Turn, then back along the canal and through the marina.

The Braunston parade: organised chaos or maybe just chaos

Anything can happen and usually does from an ‘I know my rights’ private craft which has turned a blind eye to the multiplicity of boat rally warning notices around the area and then discovered that a 70ft boat and butty pair are a pretty formidable obstacle to encounter on a crowded canal, to a bunch of happy (in the alcoholic sense) hireboaters who panic at the sight of a enormous oncoming Big Woolwich bow, engage hard reverse and find themselves broadside across the cut.
The Turn is the place to watch, not just for the antics but for the artistry with which the steerers can manoeuvre their big boats. As someone who has never mastered the art of reversing a car and trailer, I'm in awe of people able to reverse 140ft of boat and butty back round a bend.

My favourite picture: English eccentricity

The boats are everything from painstakingly accurate pieces of history to battered and sometimes much altered survivors of nearly a century of life. I kind of prefer the latter, to be honest.
We were joined on Saturday afternoon by our youngest daughter and her large lurcher puppy - which seemed even larger inside a small narrowboat cabin...especially when he decided our bed would be his bed too for the night. After a fine Sunday lunch at the Old Plough up in Braunston village, daughter and dog headed home and we headed up the locks in the company of an Aussie couple who'd come over, bought a boat and were spending six months on the canals.

A large lurcher in a small boat

As I headed into the near mile and a half long Braunston Tunnel, I spotted the headlight of a working boat behind. He seemed to be catching up which gave me the excuse to wind the speedwheel and get a shift on. Twenty short minutes later we shot out the other end.
We cruised on down to Norton Junction and turned onto the Leicester Section of the Grand Union, mooring opposite the pretty Toll House where another mate of ours lives. What happened next was certainly a surprise.

Heading home

Tug talking with Tebay at Tixall

We are on familiar territory now, heading down the Trent & Mersey towards Fradley and then off to Streethay Wharf to say hello to old mates.
Streethay was where we refitted Harry and turned it from fire ravaged wreck to handsome tug, and before that where we based our first boat, Star, for refitting. It's our boating home, I guess.
We paid a brief visit to Stafford; brief because it's such a dismal place: a variety of edge of town malls have sprung up, pulling away all the big stores, and leaving a vacuum in the town centre. Walking down the wide, pedestrianised main street with its closed shops and shabby seventies parades you expect to see tumbleweed rolling past. And all of it presided over by the vast ugly council offices, looking like something out of Soviet era East Germany.
From Stafford, the run is a level, lock-free one for several miles, generally accompanied by the railway. In a rare bout of incuriousity, we passed three people standing on isolated canal bridges looking into the distance. By not asking them what they were watching for we missed a steam train, which roared past just as we disappeared behind a belt of trees. I'm guessing it was the Flying Scotsman. Damn!

Hot air balloons rise into the clear sky

The final lock on the Staffs & Worcs brought us to the beautiful open expanse of Tixall Wide where we moored behind another handsome tug, Tebay and settled in for some tug talk. It's a historic 1929 boat with a Kelvin engine and even deeper in the water than us. On an evening stroll we saw a pair of hot air balloons go up and drift off across the clear sky, then spoke to some lads fishing - and one caught a pike right in front of us. It was young and about ten pounds but big enough and with teeth looking mean enough to make me stand well clear while he released it.

Just keep well clear of those teeth!

Today we've wandered down from Great Haywood where the S&W joins the Trent & Mersey amid an increasing number of boats and a corresponding decreasing number of mooring spots. Finally we've tied up just above Wood End Lock on the run in to Fradley junction.

What a difference a year makes

This canal is not short of locks - 33 since we started

Pretty much exactly a year ago we were coming through Awbridge Lock on our way down the Staff & Worcs and got talking to a couple of old boys about the forthcoming EU referendum.
“Oh yes, we’re voting leave” they agreed. “We want to make Britain great again.”
A year on, coming back up the canal we reached the same lock and reflected on what an extraordinary amount had changed in that twelve months. Contrary to what most of us anticipated, the country did vote for Brexit. We lost one Prime Minister and got a new one, the ex-Chancellor became a newspaper editor, the people’s apparent favourite as P.M. didn’t stand and Theresa May crept almost un-noticed in Number 10. And now she’s on the brink of going after Jeremy Corbyn, the ‘looney leftie’ proved to be a formidable campaigner and she proved to be anything but the ‘strong and stable’ leader she claimed to be. A lot happens in a year even when you’re enjoying life at 4mph. One thing's for sure: Britain's not yet great again.We are boating our way slowly east round the S&W after returning from a glorious week of walking on the Pennine Way. Well, five days’ of glorious walking and two of hiding from the rain in galleries, museums and shops! Where we are going, I can’t tell you because we don’t know ourselves!
Over the past three days we have meandered our way from Stourbridge to the outskirts of Stafford. The Staffs & Worcs is a strange canal; delightful in long stretches yet it’s hard to recall many individual locations. I frequently look at the name of a lock and can’t for the life of me recall what it looks like.

Terry the Terrapin looking lonely on his rock

The canal is at its best in the miles beween Stourton, where we joined, and before Wolverhampton rears its head. Weaving along between high trees, low cliffs and a small river, with locks often hewn out of the sandstone rockfaces, it feels more country river than once-industrial canal.
We enjoyed it in good weather (we spotted a large but lonely terrapin sunning itself on a rock) though the rain started as we neared the notorious narrows at Wolverhampton, where a section of hard rock meant the early navigators could only make a half mile of it, one boat wide, with occasional passing places. And, of course, on a day when there had been hardly any boats about, we met two exactly there. Fortunately the first warned us about the second so we were able to hang back and avoid traffic chaos. The rain got worse and we moored as soon as we were clear of Wolverhampton ‘bandit country’ within earshot of the M54.
We were now on the ten mile lock-free summit level which wanders around the desolate flat landscape there, passing a huge rail-interchange freight site which was just a plan a year ago but now looks well into the build.
After that, we began our descent towards the little town of Penkridge (one of few towns on the route. What peace this countrified route once enjoyed has long been shattered by the M6 which runs noisily close to the canal for miles here.

The massive B52 climbs into the sky

Smaller but no less thrilling, the Flying Fortress

And there was more noise, too, when a huge USAF eight engined B52 Strato-cruiser banked across the sky, followed shortly by a tiny (in comparison) WW2 Flying Fortress. They were stars of the nearby Cosford Airshow, though sadly the only ones we saw.
Today we’ve moved on through more miles of bland country, interspersed with scattered locks to the edge of Stafford. Tomorrow it will be Great Haywood and then where? Who knows. A bit like the state of the country right now.

After the rain, the sun

Seadog Brian goes walkies

Phew what a scorcher, as the tabloids used to say. The past few days of glorious sun have made last week's rain a distant memory.
We've taken full advantage, making a stop at one of our favourite mooring spots just outside Stourbridge before heading down to another favourite, Kinver.
That Stourbridge stop wasn't a planned one: a Chad Valley child's play tent wrapped itself round the prop. And the game to get it off wasn't much fun, I can tell you. The tent frame was plastic coated spring steel and defied all my on-board tools to remove it. I had to borrow a pair of bolt croppers from Martin Brookes' yard nearby to cut my way through it. (The next day I invested in my own pair just in case...)

The sun sets on an idyllic scene at Stourbridge

Anyway it was a chance to watch the sun go down on an idyllic scene of horses grazing, ducklings and goslings feeding and birds singing their evening songs.
We moseyed on down to Kinver and got there last night to find the moorings virtually full. Suddenly the canal is busy! It must be the sunny weather. This morning we set out for what will probably be a final 'training session' before our week on the Pennine Way, heading for a longish loop over Kinver Edge.
I wonder how many boaters visit the remarkable houses carved into the rocks up there and then walk across the Edge to enjoy its spectacular views across three counties? Few I suspect. It doesn't help that the Kinver moorings are only 24 hour ones - a stroll up to the High Street Co-op or visit to the lockside pub is probably their limit.

Distant views from the Edge

Boy, what are they missing: the climb is steep but the views on a sunny day like today were immense. There are plenty of benches along the way to sit and admire it, including a poignant one to SAS medic Richard Larkin, blown up in one of those deathtrap 'snatch' Land Rovers in Afghanistan.

An SAS medic and father of three killed in Afghanistan

We headed along the high ridge and dropped down the southern side – where we managed to get pretty comprehensively lost in a maze of pathways. We got out in the end of course and via a couple of country lanes to Caunsall where the always popular Anchor Inn was heaving. From there a path took us over a pretty little cast-iron river footbridge to the canal and a two-mile walk back to the boat. I think we managed around six overall.
When I say 'we', Seadog Brian only did about four – the remaining two he did carried in my rucksack like some Indian maharajah riding in state. I even had to give him my hat because his head was getting too hot. The things we do for our dog, eh!

Brian models the latest in canine headwear

Tomorrow we are off to Suffolk to hand the Seadog over to our daughter's keeping while we get ready for our walking exploits. I'll try and do some Pennine blogging – if I have the energy.

Stormy weather

The fires of hell wouldn't have doused our rain

Boy, have we had some rain the last couple of days. Fortunately the biggest storm – hail, winds, rain, flooding – came while we were sitting in the pub. By the time we headed back to the boat, the skies had more or less cleared though our heads were a tad fuzzy.
Short of walking training for our up-coming Pennine Way foray, I spotted a local hill and decided we should walk up it. It wasn't hard to spot, the canal from Windmill End winds around the base of the steep Netherton Hill. As an aside, it really is remarkable how bumpy this part of the Black Country is; you're up and down hills everywhere.

Netherton Hill with St Andrew's at the top

Anyway, back to our walk. We did a brisk mile and a half along the towpath to bring ourselves to a footpath straight up the 500ft hill to St Andrew's Church perched on its summit. It's a pleasant stretch of towpath, often quite countrified, and the walk is made even better by the really cleverly crafted and fascinating local history signs along the way: Netherton was the home of chain and anchor making (the Titanic's anchors were made here), St Andrew's sat on a volatile coal seam which would spontaneously combust sending up smoke and flames 'the fires of hell' through the churchyard: that sort of thing. Would that some of the current crop of canal signage elsewhere could match the style and content of these. There are 35 in all, made by Luke Perry and his team for the Dudley Canal Trail.

One of the fine towpath local history panels

The walk up the hill was a short, muscle-straining one, rewarded by spectacular distant views. We then wandered round its Gothic Victorian graveyard, full of tombs and monuments broken and twisted by that unstable ground below them.

The Gothic Victorian ruins of St Andrew's churchyard

After that we boated along the same stretch of canal, hiding under an umbrella through the first rainfall of the day, and finishing up at Merry Hell Hill moored in the bland modernity of the Waterfront development, between offices and what seems to have been a failed attempt to create a vibrant waterfront of bars and restaurants of which only a Wetherspoons and a shabby looking pastiche pub of some old industrial building - the only vague nod to the fact that the whole site used to be the vast Round Oak Steelworks. We didn't fancy either pub and walked down the Delph locks to the Tenth Lock, a bustling local with decent quality and good value pub grub – from which we watched the mother and father of rain and hail storms that flooded the road, threatened the pub and kept us firmly in our seats.

And the Delph from below with the old route to its right

Caen Hill is the most magnificent lock flight in the system but in my view the Delph is not far behind, a heady blend of engineering symmetry and beauty, with its unique flight of cascading waterfalls from the side ponds. And yet, how many boaters have ever been there? In a better known part of the system it would be far more widely celebrated.
(Incidentally, the Delph was once nine locks rather than eight before the main lock flight was rebuilt with one less lock. Hence the bridge at the top is 'Nine Locks Bridge' and the pub at the bottom 'The Ten Locks') You can see the track of the old locks in the undergrowth to the side of the flight.
We got through the Delph in the sun, then the sky blackened and the rain cascaded. On with the waterproofs and up with the umbrella and we carried on through a mix of scruffy industry and pleasing country (but always with too much floating rubbish) to reach the 16 locks of the Stourbridge flight in sunshine again.And the sun held on until half way down when the heavens opened. I struggled into my waterproofs – and immediately the rain stopped. It's a nice flight, with its familiar view down the locks past Dadford Shed and the glassworks cone. From the lockwheeler's view, though, I have to say it's probably the most dog mess strewn that I've had to tiptoe through in years. Horrible.
Today we are, yet again, moored in Stourbridge. And the sun is shining – for the moment.