Voyage of the Spurvehog 2025

 We had left ourselves about 3 hours of boating to get back to Gayton and so we set off after Chris had a call at 9.00am,  It was a glorious clear sunny morning though still cold.  It was so cold in fact that I had been able to see my breath in the bathroom this morning! It certainly warmed up during the day and by four o'clock it was glorious.  The route between Weedon Bec and Gayton is one we have done often, and so it's very well known to us now.  It was glorious in the sunshine and with fantastic hedgerow blossom.  There's a boat going through the bridge in the centre of the picture, but the trees are just filling the space weighted down by the blossom.  The canal passes through some open country, and sometimes you can see hills in front and to the side.  There were quite a few boats moving about, but not in this shot! This is the last bridge we go through before we moor up.  Like so many others it is of course on a bend!  I had to m...

 We had decided to start early this morning, and Chris was at the tiller just after 8.00am today! We set off along the cut to Calcutt Locks which were the first obstacle and the last of the locks on this stretch of canal. There are three with quite large areas of water around some of them. After that we came down to the Oxford Canal which joins from Napton which is the route that comes from Oxford and which we did in May last year.  To get on the canal here we turned left to take us back to Braunston.  It's quite a windy bit of canal for quite a lot of its length with some tight bridges which are always on corners, or so it seems.  This one has a big entrance and then a small way out!  There are stretches where there are a lot of boats moored up, and this one was definitely more attractive than most! We then arrived at Braunston where there is a complex three way junction - the way we have come, the route we were going on and another route taking off to Brinklow...

Chris had a call first thing this morning, so we didn't set off until about 10.30am.  We've travelled 6 and a half miles, some of it in lovely sunshine, and we've done 20 locks, but spread out with half a mile or so between quite a few of them, and then a cluster of 4 in the middle and then 10 at the end.  Chris has done the lock winding today, and I've done the driving - both activities require concentration, and both have their own rewards.  I made some very smooth entrances to locks (and not others!) and Chris did a good job preparing locks ahead on the flight. The first part of our trip was through quite wooded landscape which looked very green in the sunlight. Not everyone's journey had been so successful through the area though.  We met a CRT man nearby and he said that CRT had been going to move this but 'historical boating' had got involved and so now what has to happen next is ever so much more complex.  As we went past the boat, it was clear that t...

The first part of the canal we travelled to the Hatton Locks was through quite varied countryside - sometimes quite narrow cuttings, through a tunnel and through pretty bridges.  I was very pleased with these pictures. And then this one as we got closer - the light was just right I thought! We came from there into quite a steep cutting leading to a short tunnel, the Shrewley Tunnel 433 yards long. It has a tunnel that the horses could go through too, which was above the canal tunnel and is why this photo has a path going up quite steeply as it approaches the tunnel mouth.  It shows the strata of the rocks very clearly - sandstone beds with shale interspersed.  The tunnel was fairly uneventful, though the driver reported that there was some water descending from the roof in places! There was some lovely light again as we approached the end of the tunnel.  Not very much further on you come to the Hatton Flight - a formidable achievement and something of a challenge too...

 Chris had had lots of really windy bits yesterday along the Stratford Canal - I more had bends.  One was quite sharp under a bridge but was not apparent until you got partway through the bridge! I made it without touching the sides, but you could see where lots of other boats must have hit the bridge structure as they went past.  A lot of the canal going south from Shirley was in leafy woodlands, and sometimes when the sun shone it was really pretty.  But it was cold - gilet and jacket on top weather! We came to a place that was called Dickens Heath on the map, which did not suggest that it was a historically based settlement, and indeed it was not.  It was bounded on 2 sides by the canal with quite a sharp bend in the middle as far as the canal was concerned.  And the centre as we went past looked like this! The blue steps were a cascade of water going into a sort of trough at the bottom where presumably the water was then pumped back to the top.  Th...

The BMG Federation Committee all arrived at the boat successfully, and we had a very good set of meetings from lunchtime yesterday until lunchtime today.  Thanks to one and all. It was quite fresh in Birmingham today, and we set off at about 1.45pm for a trip towards the south.  Canal Plan had suggested as a first offering that we went back down the flight of locks we had come up on Thursday and then turned south to go down some more locks.  But the whole journey is projected to  be 30 minutes longer if we set off the route we have now followed to go via Edgbaston, Bournville (and Cadbury's) and then turn onto the Stratford Upon Avon canal and go down towards Lapworth where there is a flight of 18 locks! So that's what we have set about to do! This is the extraordinary building we passed on the corner of our mooring - the big crosses at the top of it are simply decoration and you can see sky through them - I don't know what you call them in architectural terms, they ...