The price we paid for stopping for lunch

After collecting some train tickets from Stalybridge Station we set off down the last four locks of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. In some ways I was glad to leave the HNC behind - the stiff paddle gear, the low pounds, the shallow water even in "full" pounds, the dodgy bit of Standedge Tunnel - but in other respects I was sorry. The views of hills close at hand, the old mills, the friendly people, the excitement of Standedge Tunnel. We had rushed it; it would have been good to have spent more time savouring the walks and villages. We shall return!

At the bottom lock we just had to pose for the camera.

Some of the locks on this canal have ingeniously cranked balance beams in order to accommodate bridges. Lock 2W (or is it W2?) has bottom gates which, from a glance of the balance beams, look like they are open when in fact they are closed.

The bottom gates of Lock 1W are even stranger: one balance beam is conventional but the other has a double crank.

The highlight of today's cruise was Marple Aqueduct. New steps have been put in to make it easy to look at it from below, but I just set the camera to wide angle and waited for a train to pass by on the viaduct. None came.

Of course, as soon as I had given up waiting, one came along.

What was the price we paid for stopping for lunch? We were overtaken by another boat, Leo, who proceeded up the Marple Locks in front of us. I had to turn every one when we followed half an hour later. We caught them up even though most of the locks were in their favour. (To be fair, though, we overtook them when they stopped after operating the lift bridge; we had managed to nip through after them.)

Leo even got the prime mooring on the junction. The 48 hour moorings on the Macclesfield Canal just the other side of the junction were full so we banged a couple of pins into the steepish bank and put the gangplank out. We had a good meal in the Ring o' Bells pub.

What's this? No locks to do tomorrow? I think it might be the only lock-free cruising day we will have done since setting off in March.

Down the Ashton

I'm sure last time I did the 18 locks on the Ashton Canal they weren't the slog they were today. Perhaps it's because last time we were ascending. Or perhaps it's because last time we weren't following a boat and having to turn almost every lock.

I'd set the alarm for 0715. Five minutes earlier and we'd have been down the locks an hour sooner, I'm sure. Oh well, there's no rush, and we're all set for new (to us) waterways tomorrow. Actually, we're already on new water as we have tied up having turned right onto the Rochdale Canal from Ducie Street Junction. 100 yards ahead of us is the first lock, Lock 83.

There's a rich feast of old mills and warehouses on the Ashton. Here's a sample of lovely brickwork at the water's edge.

There are occasional surprises, such as this garden and mooring.

At Audenshaw, in the vicinity of Guide Bridge and a historic railway junction, is a boatyard full of railway memorabilia and some interesting boats. (I've mislabelled the photo as "Droylsden Marina", it isn't.)

I think Maria operated on the Peak Forest Canal and was used in a re-enactment of loading with limestone when Bugsworth Basins reopened after restoration.

Samuel Barlow boat Daphne is there ...

... as is Clio, on the inside of Daphne.

Just beyond, under the motorway bridge, is an old (day?) boat with mooring pins jammed in the 'ellum as a tiller. It's there, presumably, to keep the rain out of the hold to stop it sinking.

As we got nearer the centre of Manchester we began to see more 20th and 21st century buildings. Downstream of the Clayton Locks is the Etihad Stadium, home of Manchester City Football Club. For a time, while I was at university, I lived within walking distance of their old ground at Maine Road.

Today we saw the first dumped supermarket trolleys of this trip. (We've been away for three weeks now, but it seems much, much longer. "Home" seems a different world, somehow.) Back to the trolleys - this is the second of two today, in a side arm.

Nearly all the locks on the Ashton have Lockgear hydraulic paddle gear with large spindles. I got used to them, but it was a relief to be able to wind one or two conventional rack-and-pinion type paddles. All the paddle gear had "handcuff key"-operated anti-vandal locks in various states of repair.

Incidentally, the out-of-focus sign behind reveals that CRT have yet to plaster one of their stickers over the original BW notice. Are these really the badlands? We saw no evidence of trouble.

The buildings got increasingly wacky. This one looks to be a stack of three giant playbricks, only approximately aligned, with huge lettering on them. The words are the names of waterways in the area, including Bridgewater Canal, River Irwell, Rochdale Canal. I couldn't read it all as I was too close.

And so to our mooring for the night, just on the Rochdale Canal. After a walk through the city we had a barbecue. A brick wall and a bench provided the perfect place out of the wind.

I had to attend to the prop just once - a thick bramble was round it. Easy to remove. I've been warned to expect worse on the Rochdale, but I can be in and out of the weed hatch in seconds!

Two-way working? I don't think so

We moved from Romiley today (at last), but only as far as Dukinfield Junction where the Peak Forest Canal meets the Ashton Canal.

The first bridge we came to was this marvellous brick specimen carrying a railway line, although you wouldn't know that merely by passing under it.

A little further on a house on the offside has a narrowboat weather vane.

We heard on the news this evening about an incident involving an aeroplane having to be escorted by fighter jets as it came in to Manchester Airport. This wasn't the one, but I happened to take this photo of a low-flying plane overhead.

Rather more interestingly, we squeezed through Woodley Tunnel, grateful that we didn't have a chimney sticking up, to find that the sign reads "Method of working: two-way traffic".

You can indeed get two narrowboats through the tunnel in opposite directions, but not at the same time!

We tied up before the junction, but later decided to top up the water at the cunningly concealed water point at Portland Basin. I'm sure it's not an official water point as it is difficult to get the boat to it, and it has a permanently attached hose (which, of course, was very useful). While there I took some photos of the scene. Here's the junction looking along the Ashton Canal towards Manchester.

And this is the Ashton Canal Warehouse of 1834 which now houses a museum. We looked round the museum in the afternoon. It's good, but the labelling feels somewhat patronising, much of it being geared more to schoolchildren than adults.

Tied up in the basin itself are several old wooden boats, including Southam, which we saw on the Peak Forest Canal.

At least one of these boats is not what you might call a "runner".

After watering up we wanted to get back to the "safety" of the Peak Forest Canal, where there were some boats tying up. I knew there was a winding hole just past the lift bridge, so we headed up there. Before the lift bridge there was a wide which I thought might just be big enough to wind in. It wasn't.

Never mind, it wasn't an official winding hole. So we carried on through the lift bridge to the winding hole as marked in Nicholson and started to wind there. It was a bit overgrown with trees, but I had my bow saw out and cut back as much as I could reach.

At the towpath I used the shears to trim back some brambles to make it easier to get the back end round.

But it wasn't to be. The winding hole was too silted up for the bow to go any further forward. We had to give up and go another 3/4 mile to the next marked winding hole, just south of Warble's Boatyard and just north of Bridge 4, where we got round all right. Then we headed back to our mooring for a rather late tea.

We're ready for our assault on the Ashton Locks tomorrow morning, and then we look forward to welcoming Jim, formerly of Starcross, who we hope will join us as we ascend the Rochdale Canal.

All this, and I haven't said anything about what we did yesterday, which was to visit Andrew and Bekka in Sheffield. We cheated, and took the train. I'll have to write properly about this at some point, as the train went through beautiful Peak District countryside.

Ducking - and a bit of diving

Saturday and Sunday, 2nd and 3rd August 2014

We left our mooring at Marple, just before the junction, at 0745 in an attempt to be first down the locks. A boat, Quackers, was still tied up where it was the previous night, seemingly on the lock landing.

We just squeezed in front in order to work the lock. As the lock filled (only the gate paddle in use - very slow) a man appeared on Quackers. I asked him about his choice of mooring, and he replied that he'd been told by CRT that it was all right to moor there. Oh well.

The locks of the Marple flight are deep. The sixteen locks lower/raise the canal by a total of 214 feet, that's an average of 13 feet 4.5 inches per lock. The bottom gates are correspondingly massive.

This one weighs more than two-and-a-half tonnes. And these are narrow locks.

Lock 13 has a lovely horse tunnel under the road.

At nearly every lock there's a small tail bridge. The balance beams swing right over these bridges, necessitating a lot of ducking while opening and shutting the gates.

Lock 9 gives an idea of the magnitude of the fall. Jubilee is perched what looks like a long way over the next pound.

Some of the locks are literally hairy! All right then, weedy.

As we paused for breath (and a few cups of tea) at the bottom a hen party came by on board Alice. Don't ask me what they were doing with the blow-up doll.

After we'd been for a walk down to the River Goyt we set off again, and immediately found ourselves crossing the same river on Marple Aqueduct, with the railway viaduct running alongside. The river was a long way down.

The town/village signs of Marple and Romiley both refer to the canal running through them. The Marple sign has a narrowboat crossing the aqueduct ...

... while that of Romiley features a boat in Hyde Bank Tunnel. It also shows the railway bridge by Romiley Station and St. Chad's church (where we went today).

For completeness here's Romiley's railway bridge ...

... and here's St. Chad's.

The "diving" reference in the title? While going across one of the narrow tail bridges to open a gate I slipped in the wet, landing on my left hand. I wasn't hurt for long. The weather, I should say, was mostly dry, but there were two or three heavy downpours. The bridge I slipped on was wet mostly on account of the full lock chamber leaking.

Tomorrow we plan to go to Sheffield by train - just an hour from here on a fabulous route through the Peak District - to visit Andrew and Bekka.

Marple to Romiley

Only 3.5 hours on the clock today. This will be another stop-gap post; photos to come tomorrow.

Those 3.5 hours, by the way, include the 16 Marple Locks and a lot of cycling to and fro. Up and down. Pedalling, winding, pushing, slipping (ouch!) Full-on, no time to relax.

We tied up under the railway bridge at the bottom of the flight, not moving until late afternoon when we did just another mile and a half to Romiley.

We've checked out the church for tomorrow: St. Chad's. Unfortunately, and unusually, there's only one service - and it's at 0915.

So an early-ish night is called for.

Marple Spice

After a lazy start we cycled up some of the route of the tramway leading to the quarries which were the raison d'etre of the Bugsworth Basins. We had walked it before, but it was much quicker by bike. After about one-and-a-half miles the route crosses a road, the other side of which the route is now lost. But there's a diversion; unfortunately for me and my bike (Jan had turned back by this stage) a narrow gap and a high fence made it impossible for me to explore further by bike. Another time we'll have to walk it properly.

The original stone sleepers remain along much of this part of the route.

When we got back we had a very tasty cold meat salad, then walked the half mile to Tesco for milk. We came back with four bags of shopping!

We slipped our (mostly) peaceful mooring at Bugsworth Basin (the boat next to us started up his engine at 8.20 pm and kept it running until 9.00 pm. Why didn't he SEIZE his chance to do it during THE DAY?) and went to Whaley Bridge. I got my bike out and whizzed up the inclined plane of the Cromford and High Peak Railway, and returned via the town. Just before the railway reached the terminus of the Peak Forest Canal at Whaley Bridge it passed over the River Goyt on this bridge.

The transshipment shed is more impressive from the back, rather than from the canal.

I'd been away from the boat for only 15 minutes; on my return we made our way to Marple. On the way, in occasional torrential rain, I tried for another view shot. Irritatingly, just after I took this photo and shut the camera down, a train came onto the viaduct. By the time I'd switched on the camera again it was too late. The train had gone and so had the gap in the trees.

We tied up in Marple not much before 8.00 pm, then walked into the town in search of food. The Navigation, near Lock 13, had stopped serving food, so we got a takeaway from the Marple Spice Indian restaurant. Very good. (While waiting we popped in to the Navigation across the road where I sampled the Robinson's Unicorn. That was good too.)

Snaking our way onto the Peak Forest Canal

As I write this, eating a slice of bread with some of Helen Tidy's delicious Lemon and Lavender Marmalade on it, it's just been raining. Not a lot, but enough to give the outside world a bit of a wetting.

This is a morning update so that I can post some of yesterday's photos, starting with one of the Macclesfield Canal's turnover bridges, known as snake bridges.

There are clear indications that we're entering "the north", and it's not just the changing accents of the people we greet. This is Hovis Mill in Macclesfield, where the bread was made.

Then come Adelphi and Clarence Mills, followed by Goyt Mill.

At Marple Junction the Macclesfield Canal joins the older Peak Forest Canal.

We've been treated to excellent views of hills far and near on the Macc, but on the Peak Forest it seems to step up a gear. This not very good photo shows some of what's on offer. The view across the Goyt(?) valley gets even better as you go towards Bugsworth/Whaley Bridge.

This is where we are now (and it's started raining again). Bugsworth Basin.

As soon as I hit "publish" we'll explore our surroundings.