Visitors !

We have moved around 400 yards down the canal today, so have managed to stay within our target of travelling at our ‘days per mile’ target.

However …… we have had our first visitors today since setting off !  Martyn and Vanessa travelled over from just outside Burton-upon-Trent to spend the day with us, and help move the boat up through another lock.  We had a great day with them.  Martyn is a history teacher and hopefully he’ll be able to pass on a bit more canal history to his pupils when talking about the Industrial Revolution – without the canals there may well have not been a revolution in our industrial development which in turn put the ‘Great’ into Great Britain.

We had a substantial lunch in the Hartley Arms, and good value. It’s some eight or nine years since Deb and I visited the pub – at that time we had Kangaroo Burgers. Apparently they’re not serving them anymore – oh well, life moves on.

 

 

Five boulders

Whilst at Norbury, we found a six mile walk around the area, marked at intervals by large boulders apparently deposited ‘in the neighbourhood’ during the last ice age. It proved interesting at least a couple of times – chased across a field by young bullocks on one occasion, and fighting through a thick overgrown hawthorn hedge to find a stile on another. Still we found all five boulders, and went to the pub to celebrate afterwards !

 

Highs and Lows (and ghosts)

 

Tonight (Saturday) we’re moored at Wheaton Aston – still on the Shropshire Union Canal, around 10 miles north of Wolverhampton. We spent a couple nights at Norbury Junction (and a couple of hours in the pub – Junction Inn – lovely cheesy chips).  Trouble is there was no internet (3G) connection so we couldn’t blog. The Shropshire Union Canal is a popular cruising route from the West Midlands through to Chester, and so there’s always someone to wave to as you pass. The canal was one of the last major through routes to be built. Surveyed and designed by Thomas Telford, in essence it cuts across the landscape on a series of embankments and cuttings, and was completed in 1835. Other slightly older canals generally followed the contours of the land. The embankents are up to 60ft high, and I find it fascinating that in surveying from horseback, Telford managed to work out the level the canal had to be to be in order to build embankments from the rock and soil taken from the cuttings.

The passage by boat allows alternate lofty views :

and then deep, and often rather eerie, cuttings some times cut through rock (by hand – there were no steam tools then).

Most canals have stories and legends attached to them, however this one seems have more than its fair share of ghosts. Apparently a monkey-like black hairy apparition is said to appear at bridge 39.

Bridge 39

In the late 1870s a labourer returning with his horse along the towpath met this particular phantom which is said to have leapt on his horse and rode off. Was it the remoteness of the canal that allowed too much time for active imagination to take over, or too many visits to the numerous pubs along the way ?

Interestingly this bridge has a telegraph pole in the arch, but no longer any wires attached. The main telephone link between Birmingham and Manchester came this way for many decades – presumably before fibre optics took over.