My narrow escape (Home)

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...

At the northern end of the Macclesfield Canal there is a short section of about 6 miles that goes further into the Peak District - the Upper Peak Forest Canal. Instead of taking the boat there and back (swing bridges and low headroom on this stretch) I decided to cycle this canal to the end. This canal was built to transport lime and limestone from the quarries in the mountains to the rest of the canal network. Where the canal ends there are inclined planes and railways where horses pulled wagons from the quarries to where they could be loaded onto the boats. Going along this canal means going deeper into the hills with fantastic views. The canal clings to the hillside without any locks here. Often it goes through wooded areas that smelled heavily of wild garlic. I wish I had been here a few months ealier to harvest that! Except for the stretch where it didn't smell of garlic, but suddenly strangely sweet and delicious. Google reveals that this is a sweet factory called Swizz...