A Hard Day’s Flight

A Hard Day’s Flight ?  – that’s right, and not a misspelling !  Today we’ve come up the ‘Wigan 21’ flight of locks.  In twenty years of boating this had to be the toughest we’ve done, AND that was sharing each lock with another boat too !

Tonight’s mooring is just north of Wigan.

We had a great week in Liverpool, tied up in the docks and managed to tick off all of the things we planned to do :

Maritime Museum

Slavery Museum

Anglican Cathedral

Walker Art Gallery

Museum of Liverpool

Tate Gallery

Hardman’s House

Open top bus tour

Ferry across the Mersey

Real tourists !

On the way out of Liverpool we passed by the Tobacco Warehouse :

This is just the end of it

We’d seen it from the river a couple of days earlier. Built in 1900, it is still the world’s largest brick building – 27 million bricks.

Unoccupied for the time being, it is apparently going to be developed into apartments

Anyway, back to the Wigan Locks – what makes them tough ? It’s a combination of things really; there’s twenty one wide locks one after the other for starters; a number of them have very leaky gates, and broken paddles, meaning they take forever to fill or empty; some of the gates are so heavy, they have to be winched open –

The heaviest gates of course didn’t have winches; some gates won’t fully open, whilst others won’t close if you do fully open them; and then there’s the occasional empty pound between locks :

This was about a third of the way up

Glad it’s done though. We need to go down again at the end of August, but we’ll worry about that then !

Ferry ‘cross the Mersey

Liverpool skyline from the Mersey

Today we’ve been across the River Mersey to Seacombe, and Woodside – both on the Wirral peninsular. By contrast to the city on the other side it was rather quiet !

At Woodside, there was an opportunity to look inside a German WW2 U-Boat, U-534, which had been recovered from the sea-bed off Denmark fifty years after it had sunk during the war. It had filled with silt which had the remarkable effect of preserving nearly everything inside, including any documents.  All personnel had got out before it sank, although apparently one or two did perish afterwards. Most of the machinery had gone a bit rusty, but still there….

Part of the engine room

 

Looking back through the engine room

 

The damage from the depth charge which sunk it in 1945

 

Motor room

 

Just some of the artifacts recovered from inside the U-boat

 

Plan of U-534

Yesterday we took an open top bus tour around the city …

St George’s Hall -originally the asizes court, and representing the commercial success of the port during the 18th century

 

Anglican Cathedral – 330 ft high

 

View up one of the cathedral columns inside

 

Catholic cathedral

In the Anglican cathedral was a photo exhibition, and this one caught my eye amongst all the rest – titled Whitby Gull :

 

We looked round the Liverpool Walker Gallery, and came across a famous William Yeames painting titled ‘and when did you last see your father ?’. I’d seen photos of it before, however nice to see the real thing.

It depicts the son of a Royalist being questioned by Parliamentarians during the English Civil War.

Here’s a couple of other views in the city.

Another view of Albert Dock

Sculpture dedicated to John Lennon, celebrating his desire to see peace in the world

 

Eastham oil terminal on the opposite side of the Mersey. Not really very interesting, however during my first trip in the Merchant Navy, on a ship called ‘Texaco Gloucester’, this was the first place I went – forty years ago now !

 

 

 

 

Tourists in Liverpool

Well, we’ve spent a couple of days now, but there’s so much to see and do !

We thought for the time being we’d share some photos ……..

This is our mooring in Salthouse Dock, with Albert Dock across the water

 

Old and new riverside buildings. You can just see the Liver Building in the middle

 

View from the boat last night (toward Albert Dock)

 

‘Ferry cross the Mersey’

 

The ‘Fab four’

 

Terrace of city houses – reminiscent of Bath..

 

‘Lovers’ padlocks on the railings by the river. Our estimate of the total is around 10,000 of them !

 

‘Glaciere’ – built in 1899, moored in Albert Dock in front of the Liverpool Tate Gallery

Mersey tug ‘Brocklebank’, built by Camel Laird in Birkenhead in 1964. It was a working tug until 1989, and is now crewed on behalf of the Maritime Museum by volunteers, none of which could agree on how to moor up when they came alongside. Click on the image to see the video.

 

 

We’re on holiday now !

Moored in Liverpool Docks

Well, we’ve arrived for our holiday for a week.  Some might argue that we’re on a permanent holiday, but believe me it’s hard work getting through all those locks !

Anyway, we’ve arrived in the heartland of Liverpool – the docks.  The passage into the South Docks was only constructed in recent years. The Liverpool Canal Link connects the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, which we’ve been on for the last few days,  to the South Docks, via Liverpool Pier Head. It was opened in 2009, having cost £22m to construct.

We’ll let you know what we get up to in the city over the next week, however here are some photos from today’s journey …..

This is at Aintree on the way in to the city – for those of you who follow horse racing, you can just make out a fence at ‘Canal Turn’ – a famous point on the Grand National course

We motored a bit deeper into Liverpool, but had to stop for a while. Whilst there were lots of lovely water lilies around, they – with plastic bags – tend to wrap themselves around the propeller.  We can access the space above the propeller by unbolting a lid on the ‘weed hatch’ under the rear deck. On most occasions, clearing the prop means taking the lid off the hatch, tentitavely putting a hand and arm into muddy canal water and hoping whatever’s there isn’t something horrible like a dead fish (or much worse !). By climbing under the deck I can just about see into the top of  the hatch. This time when I looked I was amazed to see both the propeller and the bottom of the canal, and with a bit of contortion managed to take a couple of photos :

This is what the propeller should look like – for optimal efficiency. This was after I’d cleared it

 

This is what saw when I first looked in ! No wonder we’d slowed down a bit

We got to the top of  the Stanley Locks just after 1:00 pm, and started the descent into the North Docks.

Dropping down into Stanley Basin

 

Turn left by Victoria Tower. Apparently, with a clock on each of six sides, the dockers had no excuse to slack off early !

 

Re-developed docklands

 

Through a new tunnel connecting the North and South Docks

 

Coming up to Mann Island Lock, in Canning Half-tide Dock

 

Through Albert Dock…

 

…..and in to Salthouse Dock which will be ‘home’ for a week (Deb felt we needed to celebrate arriving !)

 

 

Halsall Navvy

Having waited for a couple of hours this morning for the drizzle to stop, we set off along the canal, stopping at a little village called Halsall.

By the time we’d tied up the sun was out (and the red wine !)

Halsall is only five miles from the sea at Formby !

It’s where the first sod was ceremonially dug (on November 5, 1770) marking the start of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal construction. The village itself is unremarkable, other than a gritstone sculpture ‘Halsall Navvy’ by Thompson Dagnall, erected 2006. It is to commemorate the work of up to 500 ‘Navvies’ (Navigators), who dug the 127 mile canal by hand, with just picks and shovels !

This is he … with us

Deb liked the shape of his bare bum !

Leeds and Liverpool Canal

The last couple of nights have been spent tied up outside a small town called Burscough, around seven miles inland from Southport – our route into Liverpool takes us slightly north first. Yesterday was raining so we decided to stay put, and clear a few outstanding boat jobs, although it was sunny when we stopped.

Rufford Junction. We moored up a couple of hundred yards further along.

The Leeds and Liverpool Canal is new to us, so we weren’t sure quite what to expect. Of course a canal is a canal is a canal, but there are subtle differences – it harks back to when each canal company employed a different engineer in most cases, and individual engineers had their own ideas. At each lock there are paddles which let water in or out, and having said that canals are different, it is fair to say that the winding mechanism is pretty much the same across most canals we’ve cruised. However, on the Rufford Arm of the Leeds & Liverpool we came across three different types of mechanism on three consecutive locks :

The original working boats on this canal are unique too –

The ubiquitous narrow boats, so often associated with our inland waterways, were built narrow so as to fit the narrow locks.  The locks in turn were built that way in order to save on construction costs.  In coastal or estuary areas by contrast, the same width restrictions weren’t an issue, so that boats tended to be wider (more freight carried per trip). There were ‘Humber Keels’, ‘Severn Trows’, and ‘Merset Flats’, to name but a few. River navigations and canals that extended from an estuary, on the whole had to accommodate existing wider boats already in use.

The development of the inland system as a whole thus resulted in the anomaly that current widebeam leisure boats can’t travel through the Midlands from south to north or vice-versa, hence the popularity in narrow boats !

Anyway, we’re booked to travel into Liverpool Docks on Sunday, and will stop there for a week – whilst there, I’ll research just how much narrow boat traffic there would have been into the docks historically.

Wigan Pier

We’re getting nearer to Liverpool – our early August stop-over

Brutus is moored just outside of a little Lancashire village named Appley Bridge. We’re now on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, and compared to the canals of the Midlands, North Wales, and the South, it’s really quiet – maybe passed four or five boats all day.

Last night we stopped by a lake called Pennington Flash – 1.5 km by 1 km wide, and complete with a good sized sailing club. It was formed in around 1900 as a result of coal mining subsidence; when you see how widely the land has subsided, it is difficult to grasp just how much ‘underground’ had actually been dug out. The canal itself has been built up and up as it sunk over the years, mostly using mining spoil. At one point it had sunk so much two whole locks disappeared – they’re just narrowings in the canal now !

Looking across Pennington Flash

Today we passed something I’ve always wanted to see – Wigan Pier.  Well, we knew it wasn’t like Brighton Pier, but didn’t quite expect what it actually comprised….

This is Wigan Pier !

The story goes that in 1891 an excursion train to Southport got delayed on the outskirts of Wigan.  At that time a long wooden gantry carried a mineral railway line from one colliery to another.

As the delayed train waited for the signals to change one of the travellers looked out of the window at the gantry and asked “where are we?” the reply being ‘Wigan Pier’.

George Formby Senior perpetuated the joke around the turn of the century in the music halls in Wigan adding that when he passed the Pier he noticed the tide was in (referring to the constant flooding in the low-lying area due to coal mining).

With the demise of the collieries in the area, that particular gantry was taken down, however in actuality a ‘pier’ in this part of the world is also a device for tipping the contents of coal trucks onto canal boats.  There were once many such devices in the Wigan area.

Therefore when people looked for the Pier, to humour them, the tippler for coal wagons at the canal terminus became the ‘pier’ at Wigan.

In the 1980s, a considerable effort and money was expended to turn that part of Wigan into a hubbub of busy nightlife, centred on its historical background. Unfortunately for some reason it all failed, and the bars and clubs have now either been demolished or left derelict.

Where did they go wrong, when the canal-centred development in the centre of Birmingham works so well ?

Perhaps the Wigan Pier ‘joke’ just stuck….

 

 

Astley Green Colliery

Today we cruised for around a couple of hours, from Worsley along the Bridgewater Canal to the little village of Astley Green.  The plan was to visit the colliery that operated a hundred yards or so from the canal.

Whilst its boiler house and much of the outbuildings have gone, the head gear and winding engine still remain, despite not having been used since 1970, when the pit closed.

Astley Green pit head gear – just short of 100 ft in height.

Astley Green Colliery has the only surviving head gear and engine house on what was the Lancashire coalfield, having opened originally in 1912. What’s left of the site is run as a museum by a small team of volunteers.

We were the only people visiting, and got talking to an old mining engineer aged 82, who had worked there on and off over the years, and whose father had earlier been the Mine Under-Manager for many years – fascinating.  However we weren’t prepared for what we came across having ventured into the winding engine house. It was one of the largest steam winding engines in the UK, and is apparently now the largest surviving engine of it’s type in Europe. It was enormous ! 

For scale, in the photo above Deb is standing at the end of the engine – you might just see her !

It’s a horizontal twin tandem compound steam engine made by Yates and Thom of Blackburn, and delivered 3,300 horse power. Whilst there isn’t any steam on site now, it is occasionally run on compressed air. It was designed to lift nine tons of coal every 2 minutes from half a mile underground !

The winding drum/flywheel is 27 ft in diameter. Here’s a photo of the engineers responsible for the engine earlier in the 1900s. The winding drum is behind them.

 

For scale Deb is next to the drum

The engine needed smaller engines to operate the brakes and reversing operations, as it was too large for manual operation.

Not to be left out, here’s Nick by the two eccentric cranks on the drum flywheel.

Sadly they weren’t able to run it whilst we were there. But well worth visiting if ever in Lancashire.

 

Where it all began

Tonight we’ve stopped at Worsley, west of Manchester

From a canal perspective, Worsley is where it all started. Coal had been worked on the Duke of Bridgewater’s estate for a number of years, and in 1760 following a failed love affair the Duke threw himself into a project proposed by his land agent, a John Gilbert, and the Bridgewater Canal came into being as a result, starting in Worsley.

Coal seams ran under the higher ground to the north, and John Gilbert considered it possible to construct an underground canal. This could be used to help with both draining the mines, and providing a source of water for the new canal to Manchester.

The underground canal was constructed from Worsley Delph, an old sandstone quarry near Worsley Brook. At one time a million tons of coal a year passed through this tunnel. To relieve congestion a second tunnel was constructed which met with the original about 500 yards in.

Around 47 miles of underground canals were constructed all together, on four different levels, connected by a water powered inclined plane and lifts.

Specially designed boats were used in the tunnels. These were only four and a half feet wide with protruding ribbed sides and so were given the nickname of “starvationers”. They were loaded with coal at the coal face, were hauled from level to level on the inclined plane and brought the coal out onto the main canal which was engineered by James Brindley, to transport the coal into the city of Manchester. The scheme nearly bankrupted the Duke at a cost of £200,000 in 1761, however he managed to monopolise the coal trade, selling coal at half the previous price, and went on to earn £70,000 annually. In today’s value, that’s an annual income of £10 million.

It was the financial success of this canal venture that kick-started the ‘canal mania’ around the country, and leading to James Brindley being employed to engineer other canals over the next twenty years.

The arm leading to the underground mining canals is between the two houses. The water colour comes from the iron deposits draining from the mines, which were worked until 1960

 

A view the other way

Opposite our mooring is an old boat house, said to have been erected to house a barge, built to take Queen Victoria for a trip down the canal when she visited Worsley in 1851…

Earlier today I took the opportunity of visiting the MOSI –  the Museum of Science and Industry. A fantastic place celebrating Manchester’s industrial past, with literally hundreds of machines from all sorts of industries – National Gas Engines, Crossley, Avro, Mirlees, to name but just a few.  Here are some photos I took :

A 1904 car built in Manchester by a Mr Rolls. He met a Mr Royce who offered to sell them for him on the understanding they were called a Rolls-Royce

The Air and Space exhibits are in a beautiful old market building with very elegant cast iron work (see below)

This evening after we’d moored up (and were doing some hand washing with our old mangle), a wedding photographer came along and asked if we minded if a newly married couple could have photos taken by the boat (without the mangle on display). So we thought that if the boat was going to be in their wedding photos, we’d better get a wedding photo through the porthole (we were banished inside !).

The Rochdale Nine

Today we’ve travelled through the centre of Manchester

Another interesting day, but first of all, last night. We left the dogs resting on the boat and took the opportunity of walking round the city centre. St Peters Square, Albert Square, St Anne’s Square, and Piccadilly Gardens. Lots of impressive 19th Century architecture.

‘Town’ Hall main entrance

 

Picadilly Gardens was still busy at 9:00 pm

We came across the Manchester Art Gallery which just happened to be open late on a Thursday evening, and mananged to find an LS Lowry gallery. During the early part of the 20th Century he painted many scenes depicting life in Manchester, focussing on people. His style is pretty iconic, in that the people in the paintings often look like stick figures, heads bent down against the cold Manchurian winter winds. This one is ‘Coming home from the mill’ painted in 1928…..

Today we made our way down the ‘Rochdale Nine’ flight of locks. These are wide locks again – the first since arriving at Braunston in Northamptonshire earlier in the summer; all those since have been narrow locks.

Passing through the city by canal is quite an experience, both architecturally and socially. The second lock of nine is underground in rather unsavoury environs –

Arriving at the lock….not too bad

 

Leaving after going down….pretty smelly, with hyperdermic needles lying around

 

The sign at the lock gives you an idea of what goes on down there

These locks are different from many others in that the water is allowed to flow over the top gates into the lock itself. A bit like standing next to a very noisy waterfall when you’re deep in the lock, and my specs kept misting up..

 

Industry and warehousing established itself along the line of the canal

 

View back along some of the Rochdale Canal

 

The boat standing Platform 3

 

The old and the new. The tall glass building in the background is the Beetham Building. At over 500 ft it dominates this part of Manchester. Hotel at the bottom, apartments at the top

 

On the way in to Castlefield Basin, where we are tonight

My plan is to visit the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry….

….probably couldn’t get much closer !