Descent into Manchester over three canals
After spending some time in Marple it was time to head down into Manchester. As I was quite high up on the Macclesfield Canal, it was a long climb down over 43 locks, some of them in some not so amazing settings. There are three locks flights: The Marple flight with 16 locks. Really beautiful but with very low bridges (again!) The Ashton flight with 18 locks. This is going through the suburbs. Perfectly fine. The Rochdale flight with 9 locks. This is going through Central Manchester and it's not nice. It really isn't. I planned to do the first two flights, spend a few days in Manchester, then do the last 9 and meet my new crew at the bottom at Castlefield. That didn't go entirely to plan. Marple flight - 16 locks Knowing now that headroom can be an issue I read up on it and discovered that some of the bridges over the Marple locks were supposed to be really low and also that there was supposed to be a really low bridge (lower than the Harecastle tunnel!) in t