We spotted this lovely house a bit before lock 2 of the day and then realised that it was Shugborough Hall - we had seen the signs from the road in the past but never visited it - still not visited but at least we have seen it!
After lock 2 we got to Haywood Junction - one of the widest junctions we have seen and much easier to manage than Fradley! We stopped to fill up with water, get rid of our rubbish and empty the toilet cassette - that all done we were ready to move on - John popped over to a Farm Shop over the bridge but it was nothing like as good as the one at Ditchford - still our favourite!
It is quite a busy junction and while there we bought an anti-vandal lock as some of the locks further up need them - signs of things to come????
One of the largest swan families we have seen - there were 9 cygnets!
Herons usually fly off as soon as the boat gets close but this one just stayed there completely unfazed by us!
Bridge 82 - built in the 18th century apparently for the gentry to cross the canal....and very nice too! This is just outside a village called Salt because the canals allowed the salt production in the area to become profitable as they were able to transport it for them, apparently it had produced salt since Roman times but hadn't really made much of a profit from it up to then. They also produced all the salt beef for the Royal Navy!
I was just amused by this - never been watched by a cow standing on a bridge suckling her calf before!
We moored at Stone last night, I managed to miss the milestone that showed the halfway mark on the Trent and Mersey canal - I shall try to get it on the way back!
Stone is famous for being the place that Tom Rolt had his boat built - he's THE famous canal boater who wrote the definitave canal book, started the IWA and promoted the start of the canal restoration programme. ALSO if you have read either of Terry Darlingtons Narrow Dog books it's where he moored the original Phyllis May until it burnt out.
This is the Star pub on the canal at Stone - we left at 10am so haven't got to go in it but maybe on the return journey??
An interesting entrance for a lock!
I thougth this was quite a deep lock at the time but that was before we got to Stoke!
This was an old brewery in Stone that is no longer used - brought out by Bass and that was an end of them!
This was the opening for one of the locks - tricky to get in - I took this just as John was shutting the gates.
John spotted this old horse tunnel at Stone and got the camera - I haven't seen one of these before.
While he had the camera he took this of me coming into a lock - not sure he knows where the zoom button is but I'm better from this distance!
This was on the way to Stoke - you can tell you're getting near the potteries! At this point the country was really quite nice.....
This is one of the locks at Stoke - very deep and scary!
I'd just had to get through this - thought the previous entrances were bad but this excelled them all - I had to duck to get through and I'm not exactly the tallest person!
This was what the view was once the boat had come up - lovely???? We had just come past the police sorting out a crowd of drunks next to the canal!
This is one of the interior bits of one of the lock - it seemed to be falling apart showing all the wood underneath. Hadn't realised that this was the structure - and this was one of the deep locks!
Japanese Knotweed is alive and well in Stoke - so much for trying to eliminate it!
On of the bits of the old industrial past. Stoke is a really depressing place to come through. So much derelict industrial building. This is the first time that we have really seen the grimy past of the canals - we had decided to turn and get out of it before the locks but missed the winding hole (it was just part of the grimness!) and so we had to do the 5 locks shown above. We did 14 locks today and feel quite proud of ourselves.
We have realised that we are not going to get as far as we wanted to so are going to turn tomorrow and do the return journey, hopefully to stay for a day at Alrewas - we shall see how the weather goes - it's been beautiful today and that makes such a difference.
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