After the Hatton flight, there is a lovely section leading up to Kingswood Junction, which is the connection to the (narrow) Stratford Canal. This section of canal is particularly beautiful as it runs high up, sometimes looking down into a valley. It winds along with great views.
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| Beautiful big trees on the meadows |
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| Looking down into the valley |
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| Flowery meadows |
Suddenly - a tunnel! Oops. I had missed that one on the map. Fortunately it wasn't very long, only about 400 metres.
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| Easy peasy, you can even see the end |
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| Entering Shrewley tunnel |
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| Still nice to emerge into the light again |
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| A deep cutting at the tunnel exit |
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| Elderflower everywhere |
Lapworth Locks
At Kingswood Junction I left the Grand Union with its big locks (woohoo!) and went onto the lovely Stratford canal. Not in the direction of Stratford-on-Avon, but Birmingham. The junction joins directly into - another lock flight.
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| Kingswood Junction |
The Lapworth flight is 19 locks from the junction, so not much less than Hatton, but these locks are much easier to handle as they are for a single narrowboat, so gates are not as heavy and also the paddles don't have these enormous mechanisms to open them. After Hatton, they looked like Legoland to me.
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| Will the boat really fit into this tiny space?? |
As only one boat fits into the lock, if several boats follow each other, the locks needs to be emptied again after each boat. On the first five locks in the flight I had a little bit of help as there were two boats following me. After the first five locks, the flight begins in earnest, where one lock follows the next with roughly one boat length in between. The people behind me stopped for lunch in the pound before this part. I felt like we hadn't really done that much yet and also the rain stopped (did I mention it rained? It hardly seems worth mentioning as it's the default these days). So I pushed on through the dense middle part.
The good thing about doing the locks completely on my own is that it is easy to establish a routine to be repeated x times. It makes it easier even if x is a large number. I did not meet a single boat again after the other boats left me after the first five.
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| In the middle of the flight |
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| Looking back down, most of it is done! |
In the olden days, when the canal boats were pulled by horses, provisions needed to be made when the towpath changes from one side to the other, so that the horses could cross over a bridge carrying the towing rope with them without having to be unharnessed. On the Grand Union Canal this is achieved via
turnover bridges. In essence, the horse comes down the same side of the bridge as it went up on, then goes under the bridge, so that the rope is not looped over the bridge.
On the Stratford canal, this problem is solved in a different way, via split bridges. Here the horse crosses a normal bridge, but it has a small gap in the middle, where the rope can drop through achieving the same effect.
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| A split bridge |
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| The lock is directly behind somebody's garden |
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| Done! |
From here on it is lock-free cruising all the way into Birmingham. There were still a few unexpected obstacles, which will be explained in the next post.
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