Christmas mystery photo

Er, not much to do with Christmas, but here's another small part of a photo I took earlier this year.

Can you see what it is? I will ask for the location later - there's not much here that's location-specific!*

*well, there is, but you'd know that only when seeing the wider picture

Anchor Cottage - a treasure trove of canalia

On the Buckby Flight on the GU is Anchor Cottage.

From Buckby cans to brass lamps this tiny, overflowing shop seems to have everything you could want to personalise your boat. I drooled there in April!

The icing on the cake

Jan iced our Christmas cake yesterday. The fruit cake itself was made by her colleague Caroline (who made Ally and Ben's wedding cake three years ago).

After the icing come the decorations.

Between the fruit cake - laced with whisky, we're told - and the icing is one of my favourite things. Marzipan. Yum.

Braunston's "other" tunnel

Yesterday's photo of the "unusual" tunnel mouth was no fake, even though it was at Braunston. Here's Fergus standing on top, to give the scale.

We came across this small culvert while walking the horse path over the top of Braunston Tunnel in April.

It must be near the east portal of the (full size) tunnel we know and love, as I took this photo of Fergus by it, again for scale, just two minutes later.

What's wrong with this tunnel?

While we're on a tunnel theme...

... what's unusual about this one?

What are these dangling inside Blisworth Tunnel?

Looking back through some photos I noticed that the southern entrance of Blisworth Tunnel seems to have several pencil-thin stalactites hanging from the roof.

I've not seen this effect before. I'm sure Shadow - crewed here by Fergus, Penny and David - didn't ping them off as it entered!

Are they jets of water? In which case, why don't they go all the way down? They certainly appear to be white things, dangling!

Any ideas, anyone? (Photo taken on 10th April 2012, shutter speed 1/110)

Braunston from above the tunnel

On a wet day in April I walked the horse path over Braunston Tunnel. Here's a view of the village from near the top of the hill.

You should be able to make out the spire of the church piercing the horizon.

One of the tunnel's air shafts is just to the right of the camera.

Top Thirty, 2012 week 50

Here is the UK Waterways Site Ranking (top thirty places) as it stood at 1930 on Sunday 16th December 2012. This is taken, with permission, from Tony Blews's UK Waterways Ranking Site.


1 Canal World Discussion Forums (=)

2 Pennine Waterways (=)

3 CanalPlanAC (=)

4 Jim Shead's Waterways Information (=)

5 Waterway Routes (+1)

6 Retirement with No Problem (-1)

7 nb Epiphany (+1)

8 UKCanals Network (+1)

9 Granny Buttons (-2)

10 Water Explorer (=)

11 nb Waiouru (+1)

12 Canal Shop Company (-1)

13 Captain Ahab's Watery Tales (+2)

14 Jannock Website (-1)

15 Narrowboat dreaming ... Parisien Star (+12)

16 Nb. Yarwood (-)

17 Boats and Canals Forum (+2)

18 Derwent6 (+4)

19 boatshare (-3)

20 nb Lucky Duck (+8)

21 Contented Souls (-)

22 Baddie the Pirate (+1)

23 Seyella's Journey (-9)

24 boats and cruising (-3)

25 Herbie (=)

26 Narrowboat Bones (-8)

27 ExOwnerships (-10)

28 Halfie (-4)

29 Narrowboat Briar Rose (=)

30 NB The Manly Ferry (-)


The figures in parentheses denote the number of places moved since the previous chart;
(-) denotes new entry or re-entry into the chart;
(=) denotes no change.

There are 178 entries, up from 177 last week.