Dear Motley Crew,
After coming back out onto the main Bridgewater Canal, we holed up for a few days at Moore, under the watchful eye of the Daresbury synchrotron. The science and research centre that houses the tower was, in the 60’s, known as the Nuclear Structure Facility, but I’m guessing that that may have been a tad too emotive for these times, and now, in the Age of Euphemisms, it is known simply as The Daresbury Laboratory.
Clearly, the Rugby Union Club here has fairly high standards for its players
This stretch of water has many interesting buildings and old warehouses, that hint at the past importance of the Bridgewater Canal as an industrial stronghold.
This long-neglected warehouse was, in the 1980’s, a workshop that produced spare parts for the iconic Vincent motorcycle, known, in its heyday, as the world’s fastest motorcycle.
In 1948, an American, Rollie Free, set a land-speed record of 150 mph on a Vincent, wearing only a pair of swimming trunks and sneakers, having discarded his motorcycle gear, after claiming that it was creating a drag and hindering him from achieving a record time. I kid you not!
Closer to Altrinchim, there stands another beautiful, decaying warehouse, one that used to manufacture letterpress type.
By co-incidence, my current read, The Dictionary of Lost Words, tells me that those who set the type for the printing presses acquired a defining, bulbous shape to one thumb - a “compositor’s thumb” - developed from holding the lines of type in the stick.
The Bridgewater Canal – the only privately-owned canal in the UK – was drawing us inexorably towards the Waters Meeting Junction and a fairly significant decision. The Forward Observations Officers and the Iceberg Watch Officers had come to us with advice on the best route to take from here based on their combined investigations;
a) the 2020 Winter Stoppages and Repair programme – an annual maintenance schedule undertaken by CRT – would affect a good portion of our formerly proposed route; in fact a good proportion of it would be un-navigable after the 1st of November; and,
b) our planned itinerary would have us at the most northern point of the system at a time of year when the likelihood of icebergs was at its highest.
So, accepting their counsel, The Captain, upon reaching the Waters Meeting junction, turned Matanuska to starboard and we headed, with some degree of trepidation it has to be said, into Manchester City and towards the infamous Rochdale Nine flight of locks. These locks are variously described as “challenging and exciting, offering a view and an experience of Manchester that tourists and many locals never experience” to “very difficult, monstrous and over-whelming”. The reality, we were to discover, was, as is in most cases, somewhere between the two.
A good indication that we were again, entering an urban environment
The Rochdale Canal and its flight of nine locks run through the centre of Manchester city. The heavy wooden gates are made of 18 to 20 - inch timbers, and each lock has an anti-vandal device attached.
The box on the right-hand side is hinged to cover the spigot and the split piece on the end of the chain locks the two halves closed. You use your trusty anti-vandal key to access the spigot
Due to the size and weight of these gates, and their reluctance to open easily, some of them have been fitted with a pulley system of chains to better facilitate their opening and closing.
The system looks positively medieval and the principle was probably used to open drawbridges
Six of them are in the open and over-looked by buildings, with the remaining three running under a car park. Bizarrely, until recently, there was no lighting in these underground locks.
The entrance to the last three locks. Perhaps the sculptures are meant to inspire hope
The noise from the water cascading over the closed gates in this cavernous space was deafening, and, it has to be said, somewhat intimidating. The towpath that I had to walk up to reach the gates and open the paddles is on the right. I could barely see it either!
I climbed the stone steps to the gates to be greeted by the over-powering smell of urine and this scene ....
This sign adorned the wall .......
Ah well, looks as though I’ll have to find something else to do here tonight!
It’s not clear from this picture, but the only way out of this subterranean labyrinth was through what looked to us like a wall of water at the end of this row of pillars. It was, in fact, the final lock.
After emptying the lock, I found it impossible to open the bottom gates, even with the assistance of a passer-by. In the end, we had to manoeuvre Matanuska right up to the gates and use her forward momentum to ram the gates open.
It had begun raining as we'd entered the last run of locks, and as we emerged from under the buildings, it was hammering down. We moored up, put up our pram cratch over the back deck and staggered inside for a hot shower. It had taken us four hours to do the nine locks, and we had travelled a mere mile and a quarter.
Manchester is truly an amazing city, although at the moment, due to the virus, there are very few people on the streets and many of its eating places and shops are closed. The street art is extraordinary ......
and the architecture impressive – strong, formidable and for me, unexpected.
The canal’s borders have seen much re-development in recent years and with that has come a new lease of life. We were last here three years ago. The re-development was evident then but now, everywhere you look there are cranes silhouetted against the sky and many of the old buildings have their facades hidden by green, construction safety-netting and scaffolding. If Bjelke-Petersen’s “crane index” is any indication, Manchester’s future looks healthy.
Manchester's inner city has some well-defined areas, and one that piqued our interest was the Gay Village, an area centred around Canal Street, and bordering the canal. In the 1990’s, the Manchester City Council officially recognised this area, following the passing of a number of non-discrimination policies on the grounds of sexuality in the late 1980’s.
The reason for our interest in this area is the delicious irony of its location. In a non-descript park on the opposite bank of the canal, but not visible from the Gay Village, is this sculpture.
Does the apple symbolise Newton or Turing's demise? The sculptor never said.
It is of Alan Turing, the English mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptanalyst, who, during WW 2 was responsible for the development of the Enigma machine, a device used to crack intercepted, coded messages from the Germans, and ultimately helping the Allies to win the war. He is often called the father of modern computing, having developed the idea of the modern computer and artificial intelligence, and it was at Manchester University that he worked on one of the world’s earliest computers.
As many of you will know, Alan Turing was also gay, at a time before the de-criminalisation of homosexuality in the UK, and the persecution that he endured was such that he took his own life by eating a cyanide-laced apple.
The artist who sculptured this memorial knew all of this and before the sculpture was put in place, he interred his old Amstrad computer in a cavity beneath the plinth. The irony, of course, is that the statue now sits across from the Gay Village.
As you will be becoming aware, narrowboating is all about happenstance, and where you venture is often determined by circumstances outside of your control. Thus it was for us now. Word had come down the line that a flight of locks along our chosen route had been closed for an emergency repair and would not be re-opened, if at all, until the 12th October. We could go forward towards this closure, and sit and wait in hope, or re-trace our steps. Forwards meant 34 locks; backwards entailed re-doing the Rochdale 9.
We opted to go forwards and so worked our way through the next flight of18 locks. By the time we'd reached the top, filled with water, and moored, we'd done a seven-hour day that had been punctuated by strong winds and intermittent rain. Time for a hot shower and a whiskey. I'm beginning to think that narrowboating should come with a health warning!
The Captain, The Commodore and Mrs Chippy (who is presently in pole position in front of the fire)
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