We raced down the sixteen Marple Locks this morning. With additional crew members one person can go on ahead to get the next lock set, so there is no waiting. We also got off to an early enough start the the first boat we met coming the other way was in the bottom lock. At the bottom of the locks is the Marple Aqueduct. You can’t really see how impressive it is when you are on it, but you do…
This was the view from the sofa this morning. That’s a preening heron on the dead branch. The heron is sitting in a designated vole habitat. I’ve bemoaned before the decline in the vole (or water rat) population from when I was a kid. When the Bugsworth Basin was being rehabilitated a vole colony was discovered. To make sure that the voles were safe from marauding canal boats a special pond was dug for them and they were lovingly transplanted….
The canals were used to transport bulk goods. We’ve passed canal wharfs for coal, salt, china clay, beer, even sugar and chocolate. Tonight we are at Bugsworth Basin, as the end of the Peak Forest Canal. It’s the largest inland port on the canal system, and it was solely devoted to quicklime and limestone. Sorry, it doesn’t all fit in one photo. Limestone is mostly calcium carbonate, CaCO₃. If you heat it you can squeeze out a carbon dioxide molecule,…
Today we bid farewell to the lovely Macclesfield Canal with its swirling bridges… … and milestones that look like tombstones. We turned onto the Peak Forest Canal. This continues on the 518 foot contour, through an increasingly hilly landscape. We moored up in New Mills. The town does not really have any visitor moorings as all the available spaces have been turned into long term moorings managed by the local marina, but we found a spot that is not terrible,…
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…