The Leicester branch - up and down the stairs

With the branch off from the Grand Union mainline the journey into unknown territory began for me. I was very excited that at least the next upcoming locks are all narrow locks for just one narrowboat, which makes them much easier and faster to handle. The Leicester branch of the Grand Union goes through remote rural areas for a long stretch before it gets to Leicester itself. It winds around the contour of the land, which avoids locks for long stretches. The only locks up to Leicester are the Watford and Foxton lock flights, which both contain staircase locks. More on that fascinating concept later.

Lots of wheat fields

Wild flower meadow

Alligator!?

Almost right at the beginning of the branch there is another relatively long tunnel, which I passed without incident despite three oncoming boats. Crick Marina is the venue for the big Crick Boat Show that I have been to multiple times, but never by boat. Sadly there is no internet there, which was to become a recurring theme in this rural area. In search of internet I moved on to Yelvertoft. I was intrigued by the strange name, which turned out to be of Nordic origin, a “toft” being the place of a farm. There are also several “-by”s in the area, the most famous being Rugby. All evidence of Vikings here!

Crick tunnel with light at the end of the tunnel

Shortly after that the canal converges again with the M1, plus the ancient Roman road Watling Street (now the A5), and the West Coast railway line to go through the Watford Gap. Curiously the canal passes right at the bottom of the car park of the M1 Watford Gap services (as every Londoner will tell you, the Watford Gap is the official border to “The North”). I had read somewhere that there’s actually a back door through to the services from the tow path. I would have liked to buy a takeaway at a motorway service station to take to the boat just for the novelty of it. I did find two doors in the fence, but they were sadly both locked. So either this has been closed off or I would have had to crawl through the fence somewhere. Who knows. Next time I’ll go there it will be by car again probably.

Directly after the excitement of the service station, the Watford staircase locks come into view. You can in fact see these from the motorway if you look to your left going North directly after the services. In a staircase lock flight the top gate of one lock is the bottom gate of the next lock. This makes it easier to move boats up and down steep hills as the locks need less space. But it is not that obvious how to operate them correctly.

The Watford staircase from the bottom

Arriving at the bottom I did a little recce to find out how this all worked. There was one boat waiting ahead of me and I was advised to find a lock keeper to get on the list. I found two lock keepers working the locks. After registering I was ushered into the bottom lock as soon as I got back to the boat. The lock keepers did everything for me, which was a good thing as I had no idea how to operate this.

The locks have side ponds and some water goes into the locks and some into the ponds. I always thought that in a staircase lock flight you can only have one boat at a time, but they let multiple boats into the flight going in the same direction. By the time the whole bunch of us who were going up arrived at the top there were about five boats waiting to go down, who were then let into the locks one by one. The workings of the locks remained a bit of a mystery to me throughout, so I needed to work out how it works afterwards. I will try to explain this below for those as nerdy as me.

Entering the Watford locks

Lock gate looming above

Looking back down

So now I had reached another summit. Here were another 20 miles of cruising without locks including a lovely little side arm to Welford.

One of the few days with hot weather

I love canals that wind around the contours of the land. It keeps the boating interesting and there is a new view around every bend. The area here was quite hilly with mostly fields and some sheep and cow pastures. I even met a herd of cows on a canal bridge. It was always interesting to look at a string of hills in the distance and guess through which gap the canal would go.

I was glad there was a gate between us

After a few days of leisurely cruising I reached the junction of the Welford arm, which is so subtle that I almost missed it.

Spot the junction by the little sign ahead

The Welford arm runs for about 1.5 miles to … Welford, a tiny village. It even includes one lock. The Welford arm is truly beautiful and not to be missed. It doesn’t have many hedges or trees around so there are sweeping views over the fields and hills.

The arm was also built as a feeder channel for the summit taking water from the reservoirs near Welford to the main canal. At the end there is a little basin and a partially restored wharf, where I learnt that they transported lime stone here to make lime in kilns for fertilising the surrounding fields. Today it has CRT facilities, a pub and a little marina with a dock.

Willum at the end of the navigation

One of the lime kilns

A lock! After so many miles

A sudden very narrow bit that used to be a swing bridge

This weed floats in little islands and looks like a spider web

Returning from the Welford arm I moved north again, direction still Leicester. Unexpectedly I met another tunnel soon (must remember to read guide better!) and scrambled on the go to put up my tunnel light again. It was only about 15 minutes through, but it had its challenge. First I met one boat coming towards me. That was fine, but the steerer told me that there was a boat behind him, which didn’t have a light. Hum ok … I peered into the darkness, but I couldn’t see anything. After a few minutes I saw a little flash from what I think was a mobile phone torch accompanied by some cursing. The mobile light flashed every now and then as I think the guy on the boat tried to light various parts of the tunnel to get his bearings. As I could finally make out the boat’s silhouette in the arch of my own light I saw that he was way too far in the middle for us to pass. In these two-way tunnels you have to be really close to the wall as boats can just about pass with only a few inches to spare. I shouted at him to GET TO THE SIDE three times. He finally got it and swerved over. We didn’t hit each other in the middle but I squeezed so far over to my side that I took out some pieces of brick from the wall all along my top rail and stern railing. It is not easy to get away again when you are flat against the wall. It makes an awful noise when you continuously scrape along a brick wall for a long time and you can't actually see what's happening. There were two more boats a few minutes behind me and I heard more shouting and cursing and at one point a loud bang. This was not going well for anybody today.

Bits of Husbands Bosworth tunnel wall

The stern railing also took out some bits of wall

More beautiful countryside followed between the Welford arm and the Foxton locks. The country got more hilly as I went.

The omnipresent invasive Himalayan Balsam

A good name?

"Shakespeare's" Avon, only a small stream here

Now I got to the highlight of this canal, the famous Foxton locks. They consist of two staircase flights of five locks each with a little pound in the middle for two boats to pass each other so that boats can cross over from one section to the other. Built from 1810-1814 they are the largest lock flight of its type on the British canal system. The locks rise 75ft.

There were three lock volunteers taking registrations and managing the traffic. As ten locks take a while to get through and only a very limited number of boats can be in the flight at the same time there was a queue of boats at the top and bottom.

Upper half of the flight

I registered to go down and was the third boat in line waiting as there were a number of boats in the flight already coming up. The lock keeper said that we needed to wait for four boats. We waited for about an hour and counted the boats coming out of the locks. After number four the first boat in line got ready to go in when another boat suddenly appeared at the top lock. Number five had just snuck in after the others at the bottom unnoticed and unregistered. Some tutting ensued. But the lock keeper could hardly send them back down, so they were let through on their way and now it was our turn.

I had asked the lock keepers what they wanted me to do as I was single-handed and would have had to climb on and off the boat to go from one lock to the next. They said that the captain needed to stay on the boat at all times. Ah well that settled that question. So I sat back and let the volunteers do the work just as I had in Watford. I had one volunteer follow me down the flight operating all the complicated paddles (side ponds again!) and a lot of kids helping to open and close the gates. It was summer holidays after all and the Foxton locks are a major destination for a family day out. I ended up on a lot of photos and videos, which made me slightly self conscious as a lot of the boats up here are beautifully polished and tidy on the roof unlike my jumble of plants, bike, kayak, and other bits and bobs.

Moving from one lock to the next - looking back

Moving from one lock to the next - looking foward

The middle pound - halfway there

Every lock has a rescue bag. The locks are deep!

Almost there

Some of the side ponds

It was so much fun. I was through in a little over an hour and arrived in the basin at the bottom, where the arm to Market Harborough branches off.

The basin at the bottom of the locks

Dog mooring in the basin

The very first thing on the arm is a swing bridge with the opening mechanism on the offside, which is always difficult single-handed. And it was right by a pub garden full of people, so I was dreading it slightly. But the very nice lock volunteer appeared again out of nowhere and opened the bridge for me.

Swing bridge in the basin

These locks and the surrounding area were a wonderful experience altogether. Now on to Market Harborough, which I will cover in my next post.

Read on if you are interested in a little more detail about the history and engineering.

Building the Leicester line

Travelling along this twisting and turning canal I wondered, why it was built that way. Normally so called contour canals that avoid locks by following the level of the country are the very early canals when the technology wasn't as developed. But what is today the Leicester line was built in the early 19th century, around the same time as the Grand Union main line, which is much straighter. The reason is that the area had no suitable (river) valleys to follow and big hills were in the way. So the canal largely follows the countryside on one level, but there are also two long tunnels (Crick and Husbands Bosworth) and some small-ish embankments and shallow cuttings leveraging the then current technology to avoid locks. It is delightful to travel on it today but it must have been a very slow way to travel for commercial traffic. The canal is lifted to the 20 mile long summit level through the Foxton narrow locks and down again the other side through the Watford narrow locks.

The canal was originally planned to connect the river Soar in Leicester to the river Nene in Northampton. The building works ran into financial difficulty multiple times and plans continued to change. When the canal had reached Market Harborough plans were finally changed to connect the canal up to the Grand Union main line at Norton Junction instead via the section with the Foxton and Watford locks. The section to Market Harborough has remained a dead end.

The canal struggled to be competitive due to the fact that the locks were narrow and could not take bigger barges (although the bridges were all built wide enough from the start!). Several attempts were made to get finance to widen the two lock flights accommodate bigger barges, but it never happened. Instead the inclined plane was built at Foxton (see below). But as the Watford locks were never widened, the canal remained blocked for wide barges and traffic really picked up.

Staircase locks
Being fascinated by the workings of the staircase locks I had to research a bit more how they worked, especially with the side ponds.

The lock volunteers manage very carefully who enters the flight when. They let in a number of boats going in one direction. When I was in it, I struggled to work out how this works as filling one lock requires emptying the one above. But it is possible as long as they are spaced two locks apart. See my beautiful schematic illustration. It is not correct in dimensions and of course the canal is not four locks deep at the top, but I think you get the idea.

I thought that the side ponds are an essential part of this whole structure, but actually this system would work without the ponds, it would only use a lot more water. Every lock has two paddle mechanisms, one to let water into the lock below and one to let water in and out of the side pond. The side pond is an interim storage of water located at a level midway between the full and empty level of a lock. Letting water into a side pond essentially means that it can be reused at a later point to fill the lock again rather than just get lost at the bottom. The goal of the whole system is to keep water as high up as possible for as long as possible. It was fascinating to watch this at Foxton with the ponds' levels rising and falling. Water appeared in unexpected places (for me) at times!

Here is an excellent explanation how side ponds work.

Side ponds are not unique to staircase locks. Quite often they can be seen at lock flights (e.g. Hanwell in London), but often they are not used anymore and the paddles are padlocked. I guess it’s not so easy to operate them without oversight by somebody who knows what they are doing. I suspect it’s possible to flood an area if you do it wrong, but I’m not sure!

The Foxton Inclined Plane

As the Foxton locks take an hour to move a boat up or down, engineers thought of an alternative solution and in 1900 built an inclined plane next to the locks, where boats would be hauled up and down in caissons on rails, powered by a steam engine. Think a combination of a boat lift with a cog railway. The caissons could each hold two narrowboats side by side (or one wide barge) and transfer took only 12 minutes. This not only saved time, but also massive amounts of water as almost no water is lost during the transport of the boats.

The inclined plane was supposed to open up the canal to wider boats, but this did not happen as the Watford locks were still narrow. The operation of the plane must have been quite a spectacular sight, but it was not commercially viable and closed after only 10 years of operation. It was dismantled shortly after. Today the plane is still visible including some of the tracks. There is an initiative to restore it for leisure traffic, but it this is unlikely to happen any time soon. To date the bottom access channel has been made navigable again. At the top the channel has also been restored, but it is closed off. The boiler house originally housing the steam engine is now a museum. It was closed due to covid sadly, when I visited.