We spent most of the day trundling up a flight of eleven locks in Atherstone. For the first few we were behind a boat called Which seems like a good time to present some other narrowboat names inspired by Tolkien. I think we also passed Strider and a Gandalf, but I didn’t have the camera handy. Then there’s this. So the current score is JRRT 8, GRRM 1. Not that there aren’t a lot of GRRM fans out there, it’s…
A few years ago toasted cheese sandwiches became a thing. A tea room in Tamworth has discovered that there are other things that you can put on toast besides cheese. Marmite, marmalade, chocolate, butter, the possibilities are endless. Any year now someone will come up with the idea of putting butter AND marmalade on toast. Of course, that sort of decadence is usually sign that a massive social collapse is about to happen, so you can think of Tamworth as…
No, The Ladies of the Vale is not a Game of Thrones reference, it’s the affectionate name given to the three spires of Lichfield Cathedral. However, looking through my photos I don’t have one showing all three, so your going to have to take my word for it that there are two at one end… and one at the other. The building was built of red sandstone about eight hundred years ago, with a more recent overcoat of industrial pollution….
Princess Anne would turn up in a battered old Land Rover and say, “I’m here to see Patrick.” … She held the speed record for riding a scooter around the grounds. Our guide at Shugborough Hall has been working there for twenty years, and had many stories of when it was still occupied by the Earls of Lichfield. The fifth earl, Thomas Patrick John Anson, otherwise known as Patrick Lichfield, lived there until his death in 2005, though the house…
If you inherit a brewery, what do you do? In particular, if you inherit this brewery that we went past today? Many might be content to spend their days in a well financed and mildly alcoholic haze, but not James Prescott Joule. He decided to make his brewery more profitable, and around 1840 wondered if replacing the steam engines used in the brewery with the newly invented electric motors would save money. He set up experiments to determine the amount…
Battle swans are nothing new. Here we see a fine eighteenth century ceramic portrait of two innocent nudists (or perhaps not so innocent, who am I to say?) being harassed by a swan. I should not have to say this, but let’s make it clear: even if a couple of hot nymphs get naked in the woods for a little sapphic nookie, there’s no excuse for avian rape. Swans, can’t trust them anywhere. So that was your introduction to the…
This morning we moved the boat down to Etruria Junction, where the Caldon Canal branches off to Froghall. We are moored between the Etruria Industrial Museum and a statue of James Brindley, canal engineer. Looks like Brindley is popular with the local pigeons, who are probably in the pay of the geese. The Etruria Industrial Museum has the only working steam driven bone mill in the world. It was used to grind up animal bones for bone china, but unfortunately…
Best. Tunnel. Yet. At the top of Heartbreak Hill is the Harecastle Tunnel. The first tunnel was constructed by Brindley (actually, I think he had some navvies helping) and was built between 1766 and 1777. It was a mile and three quarters long, and only had room for boats going in one direction at a time. There was no tow path, so boats had to be ‘legged’ through – that is, a team of men lay on their back on…
Halfway up Heartbreak Hill. It sounds like a line from a Country & Western song, doesn’t it? Here I am still Half way up Heartbreak Hill And when I reach the top That’t where I’m gonna stop The rest would be the usual sordid tale of marital infidelity, alcoholism, and suicidal depression. All things considered it’s amazing that C&W singers have any energy left over to write music. Heartbreak Hill is the name given in the canal community to the…
Actually it was Midwich, not Middlewich, where space aliens impregnated all the nubile women with silver skinned telepathic children (see The Midwich Cuckoos aka Village of the Damned). Still, they sound the same so we’re locking the door and wearing tinfoil hats tonight just in case. All those -wich towns are the same anyhow, or at least they have one thing in common. No, not space aliens, salt. Droitwich, Nantwich, Middlewich, and even good old Sandwich were all centers of…