The canal winds around the centre of the town and here the towpath just stops - apparently in the horse drawn days they had a sort of pulley system where the horse had to send the boat up as far as it could get and then a rope was attached at the front to pull it through. Thank heavens for engines! You can just see the edge of the lock through the bridge on the left and on the right the river is coming in at a rate of knots.
...and here's the sign to prove it!
This sign in the lock amused me - we were careful not upset anyone and in fact saw no horses anywhere near the street or anywhere else for that matter.
Roy and I in the first lock while John and Daphne were doing all the work! We soon slipped into a good rhythm with getting in and out of locks and sharing the load. It really made a huge difference having someone with us, and we enjoyed the company.
Here are Daphne and I waiting for the men to open the lock ahead under the bridge. The day had started cloudy but soon the sun emerged again and sunglasses and hat were required.
We travelled together as far as Kintbury where they moored up for the night - we decided to continue on and have got as far as Hungerford. Another place that neither of us know. Our journey from Kintbury was made easier by us following a widebeam who kindly opened the paddles on the locks when they left them so they were ready for us as we arrived. People are generally really nice on the canals and usually are happy to help each other out.
We came through a bridge and saw this rather splendid duck house ......
......then we got further through and saw the house that went with it - rather nice we felt! AND it had a mooring!
Waiting for the lock - a lovely straight section of canal. It's nice to be back on canals with proper canal bridges but still relatively few moorings.
If anyone can identify these clumps of grass we'd be grateful. We don't know what they are but there are a lot of them and are an obvious deterrent for mooring.
We have come up through Hungerford as the visitor moorings we first came to were full on the off side where there were rings and a decent edge and we originally pulled in opposite, but the edge was bad, there were no rings and little space for hammering pegs in - above the lock we found much nicer moorings and have TV signal so can watch Endeavour in comfort!
We'll have a little explore tomorrow morning before leaving and probably have a quieter day - we've done over 6 hours and done 9 miles, 12 locks and a bridge which is enough.
I never thought to say what a historic journey we've done over the last few days - we've gone past Greenham where the peace camp was in the news almost daily many years ago, then Newbury - you probably have to be of a certain age to remember Swampy and all the battles about the by-pass and then of course Hungerford - remembered by me and many others for the terrible shootings. All of this in such a small area, remarkable.
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