There are several options to continue north from Birmingham. One is the already mentioned New Line (the canal motorway), which continues to Wolverhampton and connects there with the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal. This is the short and allegedly more boring option. Another option, which was recommended to me as much nicer, but longer is to leave Birmingham to the south-west via the Netherton Tunnel, The Dudley Canals and Stourbridge. As we were not in a hurry, that's what we did. It took us all of five days to reach the junction where the Wolverhampton branch joins again! But it was indeed a very nice route. Here are the highlights:
First of all we had to retrace our route for a few miles from the Black Country Museum to reach the Netherton Tunnel that was built to relieve congestion on the Dudley Tunnel. The Netherton Tunnel is newer, quite wide and high and not half as scary as the other tunnels I have done before. The only memorable feature of this tunnel were a number of wide ventilation shafts which were heavily dripping. It was impossible to avoid the showers. After about 4 hours travel and 3 different canals we reached the other side of the Dudley Tunnel.
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| Entry of Netherton Tunnel |
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| Light at the end of the tunnel, 3km away |
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| Finally back into the light! |
This is still Black Country territory between Dudley and Stourbridge. We went on the Dudley No. 1, Dudley No. 2 and the Stourbridge Canal. On this stretch we covered the long climbdown from the Birmingham plain via the Delph flight (8 locks) and the Stourbridge flight (16 locks). I have written so much about locks, I am not going into detail here as these were fairly standard narrow locks, but in pretty settings.
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| Delph lock flight in a nice setting and view of the valley below |
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| Waterfall in a leaky lock |
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| Stourbridge flight |
Stourbridge used to be a centre of glass making. Evidence of this can be found right next to the canal at the Red House Cone and surrounding works built in 1790.
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| The Red House Cone |
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| Warehouse near the Red House Cone |
At the end of a long day after the Stourbridge locks we found a wonderful mooring next to a hill with free roaming horses.
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| Beautiful rural mooring near Stourbridge |
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| Goose family outing |
A main feature (for us) on this stretch were the extremely low bridges. I
had not thought of height restrictions when putting racks on the
roof topped by quite big plant containers and the bike. The TV arial and
chimney were routinely off when under way in any case since having knocked the chimney off on a bridge a long time ago. It unfolded in
stages. First we just had to take the bike off the roof and wheel it through a
bridge. A bit further on we removed the big flower pots and the bike and
carried everything through. Finally I misjudged a bridge slightly and hit the
front roof rack on the side of the arch. Bugger! Rack quite
damaged, need to pay more attention. We developed a good
method to gauge the height of a bridge upon approaching it. After that
we didn't hit anything anymore, but it was very tight under a few
bridges. I have meanwhile discovered that the guidebook actually specifies the headroom of each canal. It's worth paying attention to that.
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| Oh oh ..... |
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| After the meeting with the side of the bridge arch |
Shortly after Stourbridge we joined the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal (Staffs & Worcs).
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| Just before joining the Staffs & Worcs |
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| Not every boat is looking so great here |
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| A rocky cutting on the Staffs & Worcs |
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| Deep lock |
At the end of the first day on the Staffs & Worcs as we tried to moor up suddenly the engine started making a noise like it was falling apart. It was clear very quickly that we had picked up something major around the propeller. Removing stuff from the prop thankfully doesn't require diving, but it does involve crawling into the weed hatch. The weed hatch is above the prop allowing access from above. All this is in the hot engine room and more or less upside down. I've got a large dedicated bread knife for this purpose, but removing all this gear took close to an hour as the plastic frame was hard and unwieldy and prevented manually turning the prop and the net was wound tightly around. It is a testament to the power of the engine and prop how mangled the hard plastic was.
Then the heatwave started. I am not a fan of being in the sun, when it's hot. We tried out a contraption that I had bought at the boatshow that allows you to put a parasol on top of the tiller. It was nice but as a solution it was short lived as the parasol had to be taken down all the time (remember the low bridges?).
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| A little bit of shade |
There were two interesting lock features on the Staffs & Worcs. The first one was the 2-lock Bottingham staircase, which was impossible to photograph any better. As I had alrady done one staircase at least I knew how to operate it.
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| Bottingham staircase lock |
The second one was the 3-lock Bratch lock flight, which is very steep and high and doesn't have long pounds in between the locks. Instead it uses side ponds to conserve water and is hence complicated to operate. The locks have various differently coloured paddles which have to be opened in a certain order, otherwise .... I'm not sure. I guess it could all get flooded or run dry. In any case, the flight was manned by volunteer lock keepers who helped and told us which paddles to operate when.
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| Bratch lock flight plus volunteer |
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| Bratch locks are deep |
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| Ferocious water inlet at Bratch locks |
After all this, we finally came to the junction where the Wolverhampton line joined the Staffs & Worcs. Taking that canal would have taken us a few days less, but we would have missed all that excitement (plus probably would have saved some unloading and loading of plants).
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