We are pretty excited about setting off & leaving the familiar Ainscough Mill behind for a while.
We are going to have to take a longer route out of west Lancashire, as the Bridgwater Canal breach of January 2025 is still not repaired. The Bridgewater Canal isn’t managed by Canal & River Trust (CRT), but a private company. They have said it should be repaired by the end of this year. Our alternate route takes in a lot of locks through the centre of Manchester. Whereas the Bridgewater skirts around the city & doesn’t have any locks along it at all.
We stocked up at Tesco and filled just about every receptacle we had with water ready for some journeying.
A friend, is tagging along for the first leg of our journey along the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, around the bottom of Wigan to get to the Leigh Branch. It’s so much easier having two boats in the double locks, plus it saves water too. We have really missed the exertion of doing locks since last year.
After we moored up on our second day of travelling, John was putting the back cover up & noticed a tiny squirrel on the waterside gunwale. The little chap jumped into the canal when he spotted John. So, John got a stick & coax him onto to it. We spotted him later in the day, looking all fluffy again once he’d dried out.
Once indoors after the rescue we had an e-mail from CRT, saying there was a problem with a cill in one of the locks on the Ashton Canal, the other side of Manchester. Broken cills often take a good while to fix and they will let us have more information in about 10 days time.
We will stay on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal until we have more information on the Ashton stoppage. Once we pass though Leigh we’ll be on the Bridgewater Canal (the private one) and we are only allowed (with our CRT licence) 7 nights & no return within 28 days on there.
Time for a bit of spring cleaning, exploring the area around Crooke & knitting I guess.
Crooke was a mining village with a system of underground canals to access the coal seams. The basin is now a private marina.
It is so hard to imagine what a bustling place it would have been and how filthy with all the industries belching out smoke. We strolled up above the village, through what is now gorgeous woods. The carpet of bluebells looked & smelt amazing.
The area has lots of capped mines, but this one looks as if it’s really misbehaving, with it’s huge fence & pile of stones. We looked up which pit it was and it was John’s Pit Colliery.
Now a bit of recent catch up now.
We had crew for a weekend, so a stroll up to Fairy Glen, Appley Bridge was called for. It is always beautiful, especially in the spring. The bluebells were just starting to come into flower. A friend had said about pickling wild garlic buds, as they are like pickled onions. So as well as leaves, I picked a few buds too.
After our stroll up the glen we checked everything on the roof was secure and the 2 extra mooring lines we’d put on when we moored were OK & awaited storm Dave to arrive.
We always try moor away from trees when strong winds are forecast. We were just able to squeeze past this fallen tree the following day.
February we had a 2 week holiday in Port Erin, Isle of Man. The cottage was gorgeous and in a super spot over looking the bay & harbour.
The locals did rather stare through the window at us though.
We had some very wild weather while we were there. The huge waves at Douglas were phenomenal. Consequently, no boats or ferries were able to dock, which meant the super market looked like ‘old mother Hubbard’s cupboard!!
No comments:
Post a Comment