Landscape with Canals

... or what I DID get for Christmas.

This is the second book in L. T. C. Rolt's autobiographical trilogy, and I'm about half way through. It's a fascinating read. At this point Tom Rolt is living with his first wife Angela on NB Cressy at Tardebigge New Wharf where they were to remain for "eighteen hundred days".

Let me quote from some of the description of their journey there. Here Cressy is on the Stratford-on-Avon Canal encountering rubbish on the prop and passing through the still functioning (just) stop lock at the junction with the Worcester and Birmingham Canal. Boaters today still have to deal with fouled props; but there must be few still alive who can remember the distinctive gate opening:

... the narrow channel beneath the bridge was thickly blocked with junk, as we soon found out when Cressy ground to a sudden stop.  However, while two men continued to hold the bridge open, their fellows hauled manfully on bow and stern lines and managed to drag us over the obstruction.  Beyond this, the canal was densely overgrown with weeds, but as we now had only three hundred yards to go to reach the stop lock, with its guillotine gates, which guarded the junction with the Worcester & Birmingham Canal, we ploughed on under our own power.  By now our volunteer helpers, entering into the spirit of the thing, were accompanying us along the towpath with encouraging noises.  It was as well that they did so for we needed their willing hands again when we stuck fast in the mouth of the stop lock.

Once inside the lock, I removed from our blades the Stratford Canal's final gift of two bicycle tyres and a length of old rope.  Of the many miscellaneous objects that can become entangled in a propeller, tyres are the worst, as anyone who has ever tried cutting a tyre wire will readily appreciate.  However, the job was done at last and the western guillotine gate opened like a camera shutter to reveal, framed in its aperture, a picture of the still, clear waters of the Worcester & Birmingham Canal.

I love the imagery in the last sentence. It makes me want to do more pioneering-type boating. I was going to include a photo here of us weed clearing on the Wednesbury Oak Loop, but it's somewhere in an external hard drive (I hope) but I don't know where or how to find it.