“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go”. I’m uncertain if Dr Seuss was suggesting that reading has the power to transport us to previously unexplored places in our imagination or if it serves to embolden us to travel in the literal sense. Whatever his intention, either context can be said to be true, or that certainly has been the reality for me.
Edmund de Waal’s “The Hare with the Amber Eyes” introduced me to a previously unexplored section of the 8th arrondissment near Parc Monceau in Paris, and to the lives of the Jewish community that made it their home; “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” took us to Jersey and opened our eyes to the tragedy of the brutal treatment metred out to the Polish prisoners during WW2; “All the Light We Cannot See” led me to the sea-walls of the coastal town of St Malo in the footsteps of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, and Hoffman’s “The Dovekeeper” took me on a week-long motorbike odyssey around Brittany and Normandy in search of dovecotes.
The influence of this latter book has been enduring, as I now constantly seek out these extraordinary structures wherever I go. In France, they’re numerous and their whereabouts are well-recorded, but not so much here in the UK and those that have survived tend to be in the grounds of private estates and are not readily accessible to the public. Imagine my delight then, to find the existence of a dovecote in Pendeford, right beside our first mooring on the Shropshire.
Although the scaffolding made for a less than ideal photo opportunity, it was good to see that the dovecote, which had originally been part of a large estate, was being maintained
It was raining again – apparently a clue that it was now high summer in England – and we decided to take advantage of the weather to rest up after our run through the Wolverhampton locks. Over a beer, we fell to musing on that day’s work and some rudimentary calculations established that I had pushed and pulled approximately 168,000 kgs of lock gates over the course of the day; not to mention the winding up and down of paddles and the zipping ahead and back to ready and close the locks. No wonder I slept well that night.
One of the most appealing aspects of our three-mile an hour form of travel, is that it lends itself to chance meetings and unhurried conversations that take you to the most unexpected places. So it was at Wheaton Aston, where the mundane task of re-fuelling led to us standing in a paddock at 9.30 pm waiting for the possible appearance of badgers. It was to be our lucky night. Two adults, scurrying backwards and forwards across a laneway constituted the advance party. The main body of troops followed soon after, in the form of five cubs, one of whom, in a moment of pure juvenile enthusiasm, raced ahead of his siblings to pull up just a few metres short of our feet. The Captain later commented that he momentarily wondered if the little tacker was going to run up his trouser leg!
Not our badger cubs, but badger cubs just the same
The guy who took us “badgering” was a history teacher, and when he realised that we were passing through, offered to show us around the area the next day. He took us to Boscobel House, in whose woods Charles II reputedly hid up an oak tree to escape the Roundhead soldiers after the Battle of Worcester in 1651;
Apparently there is a secret code on this house that marks it out as being sympathetic to Catholics. Some would disagree!
a Roman village dig-site;
Philistine that I am, I find it really hard to envisage the Roman village that's reputedly under my feet
and the town of Ironbridge, on the Severn River, which is the site of the first iron bridge on Earth. Astoundingly, the bridge was constructed using carpentry and stonemason joints, rather than nuts and bolts, as the engineers, who had previously only ever constructed bridges from stone and timber, had no idea of how to build using iron.
You probably won't be able to read the fine print on the bridge, but it was constructed in 1779
It seems that a bureaucrat is always a bureaucrat and no-one, man, beast or royalty, could escape payment
At the time, the area was known as Ironbridge Gorge and it was reported that, at night, the blast furnaces caused the sky to glow orange on black. Contemporary writers frequently compared it to Hades; "Coalbrookdale wants nothing but Cerberus to give you an idea of the heathen hell," wrote Dibdin in 1787. "and the Severn may pass for the Styx."
Happily for us, this section of the canal was to become one in which the local wildlife was to take centre stage, and we were discovering that the most extraordinary things can be found in the most ordinary of places. Many of the villages that exist alongside the canals are basic affairs – a cluster of houses, a pub, a convenience store/post office and if you’re lucky, a chippie. Our next mooring, Gnosall Heath is typical of these villages, and one could be forgiven for thinking that little happens in these bucolic backwaters. But, of course, one could be wrong. Upon venturing further into the centre of the village, to wit, into its churchyard, we found that this was not the quiet space that you might expect; things were in fact, a hive of activity.
As we watched from a safe distance, the swarm gradually began to settle and finally came together for the evening on the branch of a nearby tree.
I hope that there were no funerals planned for the following morning!
The last section of the canal before Market Drayton is principally one of deep, dark cuttings hung with ferns, and lofty embankments, created from the spoil taken from the cuttings. Scenes such as these typify the essence of narrow-boating so it comes as no surprise that it is show-cased regularly in photographs. One of the most photographed bridges on this leg is Bridge 39, which features a tiny telegraph pole – at one time claimed to be the world’s shortest.
Of course, I took a photo!
All that now stood between us and a few days at Market Drayton were the five Tyrley locks. Lock 5, the bottom lock, has something of a reputation and has been known to slam many an unwary narrow-boater hard up against the rock wall.
This is where you're wanting your boat to go – into the lock
The very strong by-wash on the right-hand side, however, means that instead of being able to slow down as is normally done on entering a lock, it’s necessary to head into the wash with a good deal of power and then trim your sails rapidly. Unfortunately, it doesn't always go to plan and boats can either collide with the lock entrance or find themselves being pushed well off-course and up against the rock cutting on the left-hand side.
This is what faces you as you approach the entrance to the lock
I wonder if that cave-like feature is natural or caused by colliding craft? Thankfully for us, on this occasion, we were coming down the flight, a manoeuvre that is not quite as fraught, but still challenging enough to increase your heart rate. In fact, the boat that went through before us was picked up in the surge and found itself pinned against the rocks.
As we came into Market Drayton, we spotted another pillbox on the banks of the canal. These relics of the war are dotted all over the country but as there didn’t appear to be any of Dad’s Army on duty that afternoon, we cruised on past and found ourselves a mooring opposite a row of rather nice recently-constructed town-houses.
Some of these appear to come with a finger-wharf mooring, however, if you don’t have your own narrowboat, you can, of course, always take to the water in something smaller, like this.
But what was this? It seemed as though I was wrong about all of the locals extending a warm welcome to those who come by water and this one made his position abundantly clear.
The upshot of this confrontation was a strategic retreat by the boater and a triumphant withdrawal by the cob. Swan 1; punter 0.
The Captain, The Commodore and The Cat
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