Week 2 - Stone - Middlewich

We left Stone after stocking up and spending some money in the chandlery, ready to tackle the locks ascending out of the town.
Martin set the lock up for us to steer straight in.

Approaching the incinerator at Stoke.

Coming through the other side. Stoke was not a very pretty town, my apologies to any locals, but compared to the gorgeous scenery previously, things could only get worse.

 

Coming into a lock in the heart of the town.

These are bottle kilns, a potent symbol as the area is known as The Potteries.

Etruscan Bone Mill Industrial Museum lies at the summit of the 5 locks from Stoke. We stayed on the Trent still rather than turning onto the Caldon canal, as per the 4 Counties ring.

Middleport Pottery is one of the Potteries few surviving buildings .

We would moor overnight at the entrance to Harecastle Tunnel. 

Taking a boat through this tunnel is one of the great inland waterway adventures. There is a tunnel keeper at either end responsible for controlling passage through the narrow bore, one way only! The original tunnel (1 and 3/4 miles long) lies next to it designed by Brindley taking 11 years to build, completed 5 years after his death. A curious feature of the seepage of underground springs to the summit level is that the water either side of the tunnel is tinted orange by minute particles of ironstone rock.

For 50years, teams of leggers had propelled their boats through this tunnel, (it had no towpath), and so not surprisingly Harecastle became a serious bottleneck.  A second bore was commissioned with Telford as consultant engineer, taking 3 years to build and having a towpath. It opened in 1827.

Brindley's tunnel was abandoned early in the 20th century as it was riddled with subsidence.

When you enter the tunnel, the doors close behind the boat and the extractor fans kick in. Apart from the tunnel light on the front of the boat, there is no light, as you can see from the picture. I stayed inside with Ryan and the dog. It takes about 3/4 hour to travel the distance with strict instructions from the keeper as to what to do in an emergency. Very reassuring!

Lots of reasons to clean the roof now!

The boys got their coats back on as it predictably had begun to throw it down and raced ahead to set the locks up on the top of 'Heartbreak Hill.'
This stretch of canal is so called as there are 26 locks to negotiate in 250 feet!







A lot of the locks were in pairs (added by Telford) to ease congestion, not that we met many people today,no one else wanted to get soaked.



We decided to moor at Middlewich (junction of the Trent and Shropshire Union canals) overnight, as we were properly shattered and wet!