The Legh (pronounced Lee) family of Lyme Hall got rich thanks to the Battle of Crécy in 1346, and stayed rich till the current day by keeping their heads down and avoiding trouble. In the Wars of the Roses they were Yorkists till the Battle of Bosworth when they became Lancastrians. In the Reformation they were publicly protestant and privately catholic. In the Civil War the head of the family was too young to have opinions. After they Restoration they…
Steam engines are great, and they have a room full of them at the Anson Engine Museum… … many of them today chugging away with steam from a natural gas boiler. But they are only about 10% efficient at turning the energy in their fuel into usable work. By the mid 19th century inventors were wondering if you could get more efficiency by burning the fuel inside the engine rather than using it to generate steam pressure. In 1858, Belgian…
This morning we visited the Macclesfield Museum of Silk, and the Paradise Silk Mill Museum next door. You may wonder what a mummy case of an Egyptian priestess is doing in a silk museum, but the museum the usually houses the mummy is closed for renovation, and the Victorian lady archeologists who brought it back to Macclesfield bought it with profits from the silk business. Sadly they decided the mummy itself was too smelly to bring back on their boat,…
It rained all morning, so we waited until lunchtime to head into Macclesfield. There’s a very nice public mooring on a floating dock, so we pulled up there and walked into town. It started to drizzle again, so I don’t have any pictures for you, apart from a couple of one of Macclesfield’s iconic spots: the 108 Steps. It’s a staircase passage connecting two roads. It even has a triangular side street off it. That looks like perspective gone wrong,…
Congleton appears to be a pleasant little town with a thriving shopping street that has escaped the worst excesses of redevelopment, though currently suffering from a bad attack of bunting. There are some nice Tudor… and Mock-Tudor buildings. Water power from the River Dane was important in the early industrial revolution when it was used by mills that spun imported silk fibers into silk thread. The weaving into fabric happened up the hill in Macclesfield. The fortunes of the British…
Last night when I went out for a walk, I noticed a lot of different butterflies and birds. I saw kestrels, pheasants… … goldfinches… … thrushes bobbing through the pastures… and several kinds of butterflies. It turns out that the land is part of an organic dairy farm… … so it looks as if not using pesticides is visibly improving biodiversity. This morning we walked through the fields again, pausing to chat to the cows… … to get to Little…
Today we went through the Harecastle Tunnel. That’s half an hour of navigating the boat through total darkness apart from the lights on the boat and the little pinpoint that it the end of the tunnel. Just to make it more interesting, in places repairs to the tunnel have used up almost all the headroom, so you have to crouch down to avoid getting knocked off the boat. Soon after leaving the tunnel we made a sharp turn from the…
If you open the Uber app it really looks as if Uber operates in Stone, but when you actually want to go somewhere, it turns out that they don’t have anyone willing to take you there. In fact we just wanted to get back from the grocery store to the boat (a bit less than a mile), but no luck. We also tried the local cab company but they said they couldn’t get anyone to us for half an hour…
It was cold and moist this morning, so we got off to a late start. The canal was quite busy, and we had to wait at some of the locks for one or two boats to go through ahead of us. Though it takes longer that way, there are plenty of people around to work the paddles and the gates, so it makes the work easier, and when there is a boat coming the other way you don’t even have…
The Staffordshire Wildlife Trust dues actually manage to have some wildlife in their HQ at the Wolseley Centre. Most of it is squirrels though, because the squirrels have repurposed the bird feeders. Every one is now a squirrel feeder… … and the birds have a hard time getting a beak in. This one is waiting his turn. Finally. While I was watching the squirrels (and the occasional bird) … … I got talking to a woman who was recruiting members…