Finally … a tale of the unexpected

Well, below is a picture Brutus at his winter holiday home in Devizes, however not quite where we’d planned.  Having booked a winter mooring spot at a marina at the top of the 29 lock Caen Hill flight, we arrived only for the marina to realise they couldn’t find the space they thought they had !  So, plan B – a telephone call to another marina at the bottom of the 29 locks (where we spent last winter), and a positive outcome for Brutus.   We had thought that we’d been through the last lock of this trip, so dropping through another twenty nine was rather unexpected !  With a bit of help from a couple of friends from the ‘new’ marina it was mostly staightforward – around five hours.

Now the extra locks mean that our statistics for the trip change slightly, however out of interest we have traveled through 22 counties, passed through 60 tunnels, worked through 1,465 locks, and cruised 1,875 miles, and enjoyed every minute (we can even smile about Blackburn now memories of it are fading !).

As a final look at places we’ve been, and things we’ve seen, here is a selection ……..

Anderton Boat Lift – from the River Weaver

 

Cave houses at Kinver

 

View from the top of Worcester Cathedral

 

Shakespeare’s Birthplace – Stratford-upon-Avon

 

Birmingham Library

 

Hawkesbury Junction (Sutton Stop) – Coventry and Oxford Canals

 

Running the gauntlet through Banbury

 

Oxford skyline

 

Clifton Hampden bridge – River Thames

 

Caen Hill lock flight

 

Royal Crescent – Bath

 

Keeping a lookout – River Thames

 

Wey Navigation

 

On the Grand Union Canal

 

Market Bosworth

 

Evening spent with Ian and Jane on their boat ‘Esio Trot’

 

Squeezing through Froghall Tunnel near Leek

 

Star baker

 

The ‘Rochdale Nine’ – Manchester

 

Astley Green Colliery steam winding engine

 

The Liver Building from the new canal in Liverpool Dovks

 

Albert Dock at night – Liverpool

 

Brutus having a holiday in Liverpool

 

Liverpool waterfront

 

‘Wigan 21’ locks

 

Tim and Dan on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal

 

On Skipton Moor

 

‘Bingley Five Rise’

 

Stourport riverside

 

Flying Scotsman

 

‘Hatton 21’ locks

 

Sunset in Newbury

 

 

 

The last lock

Well, we’re getting nearer to Devizes where the plan is to leave Brutus for the winter – suitably mothballed to protect him from the worst of the cold weather.

This morning we realised that we were passing through the last lock of this trip, which prompted me to calculate just how many we had been through since setting off originally last July – 1,436 of them. No wonder both of our backs have got a bit creaky ! More statistics in a future post.

Wooton Rivers Lock

To mark the occasion I took a couple of short videos – one going in to the lock with it full, and the second coming out once it was empty (the emptying itself is a bit boring taking around ten minutes)….

 

GOING IN :

 

COMING OUT :

Back to the wilds of Wiltshire

Having climbed to nearly the top of the Kennet & Avon Canal ‘stairway’ (see last post and diagram below), we stopped for the night at Crofton, opposite the pumping engine house.

Crofton is just to the right of the canal summit

The engine house museum looked closed, however having passed this way back in April and having had the opportunity to visit then, all was not lost. The Crofton Engine House has two working Boulton and Watt steam- driven beam engines inside, both originally installed in the early 1800s in order to pump water up the last remaining six locks to the very summit of the canal – there wasn’t anywhere at the summit itself to create a reservoir of spare water. Electric pumps now undertake the day-to-day pumping, however the old steam engines have been called in to do their original job when both electric pumps occasionally fail.

Here is Brutus opposite the Engine House

Around a mile across the fields and over the hill is the little village of Wilton (not the one near to Salisbury though), and just outside the village is a restored windmill which we visited earlier in the year, so we set off with the dogs with the weather brightening. The views across this eastern part of Wiltshire from the hilltop on the way are quite extensive.

Looking toward the west. The white ‘dot’ just to the top left of centre is in fact the canal

 

Looking in he opposite direction, you can just make out the windmill to the left of the picture

It is maintained by volunteers on behalf of the County Council, and is open inside to visitors most weekends I believe.  They also sell flour milled there, however it appeared this time that the sails had been removed – possibly for maintenance.  I can’t think that was a very easy job.

Wilton Windmill without sails