We left the Refleks stove on overnight, and of course this morning turned out to be not as cold as yesterday. Macc and I had a nice walk up to Avenue Bridge, which is the balustraded one. There’s a loop up through the woods from before the previous bridge, which means he hardly realises we’ve turned around! Avenue Bridge is a lot less impressive up on top than you might expect, given that it carries the route to Chillington Hall.
It was about 9.15 when we set off, and immediately started meeting boats coming the other way. There’s a narrow section through the first bridge, in one of the Shroppie’s famous cuttings.
Then we went under Avenue Bridge.
My cousin Catherine and family have a theory that it always rains in Brewood. It wasn’t raining today, but they reckoned that was because they weren’t with us.
The main bridge at Brewood had a water main failure on it a while back, closing the road and the canal. The road still appears to be shut while works are carried out. This is another bridge I was glad to get through before anything else happened.
There’s a line of offside moorings before Countrywide Cruisers. This little boat that’s covered in moss doesn’t seem to have moved in the entire 15-plus years we’ve been coming up here.
We went under the A5 at Gailey the other day, and today we went over it on the Stretton Aqueduct.
We had spotted a familiar stern from a mile back (possibly because we knew it was there). Briar Rose is in for blacking at Industry Narrowboats, but isn’t yet out of the water.
At the end of the next cutting is the single lock at Wheaton Aston. A boat had come up and another had just gone down, so we needed to fill it before we could go in.
There are three water points below the lock, but we didn’t need any of them. We were hoping for a sunny mooring between there and the bridge though — it’s a bit gloomy the other side. There’s was loads of space, so we tied up at about 11am. I walked into the village to get some bread to have with our soup. While there’s plenty of modern houses here, the centre of the village is rather attractive.
I came back via a footpath over the fields to the bridge before the lock. After lunch we took Macc for a walk which covered a loop on the towpath side of the canal, which also came back to the same bridge.
Macc had a run around with a couple of dogs in the field there, and then while he and I came back to the boat as he was exhausted, Adrian carried on to have a look at the village. The weather forecast for the rest of the week isn’t that great; have we had the last of the sunny autumnal days?
5 miles, 1 lock. (307 miles, 194 locks)