It’s really nice going through a flight of locks with a crew on board. No futzing around with a boathook trying to open or close the far lock gate, just have one person on each side of the lock, and sometimes you can even send someone on ahead to set the next lock. We whizzed up the five locks at Fradley Junction in minutes – well, over an hour actually, but that’s pretty fast for five locks. I even had some spare time to take photos.

Is there no escape from battle swans?

We stopped in Rugeley for a Tesco run, and then continued to Wolseley Bridge, a village that seems to consist of a pub, two roundabouts (US:traffic circles), a garden center, a nature reserve, and several shops selling antiques and crystal healing. There are no houses in the village however, so the pub is probably kept in business serving drinks to escapees from the boys boarding school across the canal. Staff escapees, of course, as no British pub would ever serve drinks to under age schoolboys (unless of course they were thirsty.)

We wandered into the nature reserve. Actually, as Margaret said, it’s a highly managed landscape designed to attract wildlife. There are water features…

… a bug hotel…

… and a handy sculpture of a heron for ducks to perch on.

Meanwhile humans are attracted by a range of other sculpture.

Well, maybe attracted isn’t the right word. Perhaps I mean something between bemused and revolted.

This was not in the nature reserve, but it’s a cool dead tree.

It’s probably a Grade II Listed Structure, so anyone who even mentions the word firewood gets ASBOed.