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. There was nobody in view at all! A very strange community it seemed, and appearing out of landscape that was agricultural with very sharp boundaries.
We kept on moving south and came to a part of the canal where there were a couple of lifting bridges. These needed to be wound up manually using hydraulics and a lock windlass. The first one was oddly harder to wind back down than to wind up in the first place. This is what you see from the winding mechanism as the boat goes by!
Not far on we came to the first of Lapworth Locks. There were 4 that were quite well separated and very much in the countryside. We did those and then stopped for lunch. Chris and I had agreed that I'd do the first batch, Chris would do the middle 9 which were quite close together and I'd do the last 5. So he set off to the first of his 9. As it happened there was a boat coming up and a couple of people standing around the lock which Chris got talking to. Eventually the boat came out and I could move forward. It transpired that they were in their mid 80s, had hired a boat for 3 weeks as they regularly do, but because of the closure of the canal down to Stratford for lock repair, they had been at a bit of loose end, so had walked up the canal and were very keen to help Chris with the locks. We also benefited from a very helpful CRT volunteer who opened all the locks going down the flight for us so I could motor out of one directly into the next.
Chris and Mike got involved in a complex conversation about how to repair stucco picture frames! and Cathy and I discussed Cambridge and her links with it for her education at the Perse Girls school - a long time ago. They were both very sprightly and definitely of the 'use it or lose it' brigade. Cathy closed all the top gates as we went through, and Chris and Mike dealt with the windlasses and opened the bottom gates once the lock had drained. It's definitely encouraging when you meet people of their age who are still prepared to physically challenge themselves and they have travelled some distance this time on the boat. They are off to Chester and perhaps the Llangollen again in September!
The flight of locks have quite short spaces between the bottom gates of one lock and the top gates of the next. Sometimes there was quite a bend to be navigated which certainly meant that I did not have a spare hand for taking a photo on the way from one of those locks to the next.
This was the last but one lock and beyond it is quite a complex junction. A canal goes down a lock off to the right to Stratford, we were going partly left to a lock that would then take us to a turn left along a 100 metre stretch of canal to the junction with the Grand Union which is where we were going and turning south, and there was a little triangular area of ground between the two. It's a very strange arrangement, but it meant that boats could go from Birmingham to Stratford, and down to London via this route. It's so much prettier than the route we have previously going into Birmingham along, though we have now joined the Grand Union to go south now. What also is quite remarkable is that we have travelled about 16 miles all at the same canal level. This must have been very beneficial for transport in times past where they could move around so much of the Birmingham Plateau without having to go through locks at all.
In this picture you can see the canal going off to Stratford on the right and we were about to go through the lock on the left. We were advised by the CRT volunteer to sound our horn loudly when we got to the junctions to avoid hitting boats moving fast the other way! Which we did, and we have then travelled about 3 miles from the junction and stopped to pick up water, and to check out a local pub! Someone has to do it!
Tomorrow we have the Hatton Flight - 22 double locks and then some more beyond that, so we plan to have an early start (underway by 9.00am!)
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