Down the Hatton Flight, and through Leamington

May 06, 2025

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. 21 locks are in the flight and then two more for good measure about half a mile and a turn further on. The locks are broad locks so two 7 foot wide boats can fit in side by side. It is quite a project to do this flight - it took us about 3.5 hours and that was in tandem with another boat. But it's important to choose your boat partner with care - someone who has one crew member at least, has a similar level of concern as you do about the occasional bump into the locks, has a cheery approach to the challenge and is appropriately physically agile. We were under way this morning and had waited to let a boat pass coming from the other direction at a bridge (that's another law, you always pass boats at bridges) and were just accelerating up again when a boat set off from their mooring, just as we were about to pass them. As Chris said, they knew we were there, and lacked the courtesy to wait until we had passed before they started. They were also going down the flight, and I really didn't want to spend the three or four hours with them.

We had promised ourselves a sort of second breakfast by way of keeping us going through the locks at the excellent cafe that is at the top of the Hatton Flight, so we enjoyed a breakfast bap in there - good bacon, sausage and egg! While we were there I overheard another couple saying to someone else that they were planning to go down this morning, so I asked them if they had a lock buddy and they seemed very happy to wait for us to finish our breakfast and join them. This left our annoying boat on his own for which I was not particularly sympathetic. He set off before us, and we didn't see him afterwards!

Anyway, our lock partners were great. Jan drove the boat as she was not a good walker and 21 locks requires quite a lot of climbing onto lock gates and walking to the other side, and Bob was very happy to do that. So he and I did the winding bits and Chris and Jan drove the boats. It worked very well. We had to wait in one lock for about half an hour whilst a repair crew put a new piece of wood on the back plate of two of the lock gates in the lock ahead, but that gave us time for a quick break and a drink until we could set off again.

This is the view down the flight from the 4th lock - you can see there is quite a way to go - in fact you can't see the end from there.

And this is the view looking back up after the first 10 - there are still 11 to go!! They become a bit more spaced out as you get to the bottom of the flight and there are several hundred yards and a gentle corner to go around as you move from one lock to the other. In all the flight is 2.2 miles long and quite a lot longer when you have to walk around the locks to close the gates.

We passed a number of boats going in the other direction, and had help in places from the CRT volunteers who opened upcoming locks for us, so the 3+ hours it took us was pretty good - that's between 6 and 7 locks an hour, which as big locks goes is pretty good. It really helps having a second boat in the lock too, as you don't rock around the lock as much, you are kept in the right place.

Bob an Jan were stopping at the end of the 21 locks and so we continued passing through some of the industrial outskirts of first Warwick and then Leamington. Some of the areas had been redeveloped for residential property too.

We saw quite a lot of young duckling families, but this is the first larger goslings that we have seen. They do look odd - as though their legs are in the wrong place!

For quite a lot of the journey the canal was on a high embankment and then became an aqueduct as it went over first the River Avon which is quite big here (near Warwick) and then very soon after, a railway line.

We stopped to buy some groceries at a Lidl which was right by the canal, and the towpath was just across the car park so that was very handy! Then we travelled on for about 3 miles through the outskirts of Leamington and then stopped near a bridge for a village called Radford Semele apparently named after a Norman lord in the 12th Century. The light when we moored was fantastic, and then impressive as a front came over.