In my early boating days I used to ignore side arms and branches. That's because we generally had only a week in which to do an ambitious ring, and so had to press on regardless. These days, I'm glad to say, things are (slightly) more relaxed. In my quest to explore every navigable waterway I now seek out "dead end" arms, planning my route so as to incorporate them. Like the Walsall Town Arm two days earlier, the Stourbridge Town Arm was a must for this trip, so at Wordsley Junction we turned right and headed up the arm. This was the scene of the famous 1962 "Battle of Stourbridge", the standoff between the British Waterways Board and the Inland Waterways Association over the right to make the arm sufficiently navigable to hold a Rally of Boats. Needless to say, the IWA and its small army of volunteers won, and, according to the Stourbridge.com website, dredged the canal for £74 where BWB had quoted £20,000.
Anyway, back to our trip. The image above is of the scene shortly after turning onto the arm.
All right, I have tweaked it a little. This is the original:
Intriguing fingers leave - or left - the arm almost at the terminus.
And to prove that the campaign of 49 years ago was worth it, here we are under the Bonded Warehouse at the end of the arm.
Unfortunately we had no time to explore Stourbridge itself as we had arranged to meet Ally and Ben at Delph Locks later on.
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