Wow, we’ve covered some ground in a week, off the Staffs and Worcester, through Stourbridge and Dudley, into Birmingham, where we bimbled around a bit on the BCN (Birminham Canal Navigations) and several other canals, and out the other side.
Last year, during the blog silence, we went to Stourbridge. It’s famous for glass making, and we were lucky enough to be there during the biennial International Festival of Glass. We toured the Stourbridge Glass Museum and visited the Red House Glass Cone, imagining all the glassmakers at work. Then we popped into Holy Trinity, the glassmakers church, for tea and cakes. There was a lady there who had lived in Stourbridge all her life, and she told us stories of how the glassmakers used waste glass to make toys for the children; whistles with a reed inside that were easy to break and little ducks and animals.
This year we bypassed the town and headed straight up the 16 locks of the Stourbridge flight. We were going to stop for the day after that, but were thwarted by a fishing match, so we carried on and did the Delph Locks too. We were a bit tired after that!
The next day just for kicks and giggles we set off for Hawne Basin at the end of the Dudley No. 2 canal. That was a war of attrition – the canal is silted, overgrown and full of the usual urban rubbish. When we got to the Gosty Hill Tunnel we were hardly moving. Sensible boaters would have stopped to clear the prop, but we aren’t sensible. We pushed on at a snail’s pace. It’s no fun being trapped in a narrow, dark and low tunnel where you’re moving so slowly you can count every brick passing by. It’s not very often I’m nervous on the stern of the boat, but as the roof got lower and lower I wondered if we were going to come to a dead halt, and if so, how long it would be before someone found us on this quiet part of the system?
Hawne Basin in Halesowen is a very different place to stop than we are used to. The visitor moorings there are free because they want to encourage visiting boats. Although it looks like a marina there are no pontoons so we spent the night lashed to our neighbour. We could get on and off the boat with no problems, but it was a different matter for Ollie. We deployed the gangplank, and Martyn had to carry him on and off the boat. The real upside was that the basin was selling red diesel for 75p a litre. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it so cheap.
We made the return trip through the tunnel with considerably less drama and headed into Tipton through the Netherton Tunnel, 3027 yards long, but wide like a motorway and with a towpath of on each side. We had thought about spending a day at the Black Country Living Museum, but it isn’t dog friendly, and we have been there before, so after a quick overnight off we went again.
The last time we crossed Birmingham we used the New Main Line, engineered by Thomas Telford, straight as an arrow, and, dare I say it, as boring as a wet Sunday afternoon when I was a five year old in 1971. This year we decided to take James Brindley’s Old Main Line, and what a delight it was! We crossed over other canals, including the Netherton Branch we’d cruised the day before and counted the proliferation of coot nests. I’ve written before about how much I like coots, watching the males solicitously guarding their nests and their mates I like them even more.
We girded our loins the next day, it was going to be full-on., 25 locks and 10 miles to cover to reach the first safe overnight stop. We started off with the Farmers Bridge Locks. At the top they are right under the International Convention Centre, and the towpath is bustling with people. Half way down is Saturday Bridge, reputed to be where the workers would get their weekly wages back in the day.. The lower you get down the flight of 13 the grittier they get and it’s quite a relief to finally pop out at the bottom adjacent to the Jewellery Quarter. This area is definitely far removed from the bars, restaurants and attractions of Gas Street Basin.
It was at the Ashted Tunnel that things really went wrong for us. You descend the first lock of the Ashted Flight and right in front of you is the tunnel. If Gosty Hill was low and narrow, this was even worse. A narrowboat is 6’10” wide, and the Ashted Tunnel is only 6’11” wide, so there was no wriggle room at all. It’s also low, the roof is steeply curved, and the water level was so high it was over the towpath. It was a recipe for disaster, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. Martyn went on ahead to set the next lock, I chugged through the tunnel – or rather I didn’t. What actually happened was that even though I was rubbing along the towpath to my left, the right handrail at the top of the cabin roof hit the tunnel wall, and so did our pram hood frame and cover. We were totally unprepared for the damage to the boat. At the end of the day it’s nothing a bit of black paint won’t sort out, but it certainly knocked my confidence. Subsequent research and talking to another boater has revealed we certainly aren’t alone, the Ashted Tunnel is notorious for damaging boats. I wish I’d known before we set off, we would have gone another way.
While I was licking my wounds and trying to restore battered confidence in my helming abilities, a passerby struck up a conversation. He was born into a working boating family, the youngest of 12 children. and one of only 3 not to be born on his parents’ boat, called Dover. Happily reminiscing he told us some first hand stories of what the life was like, of how his Mum would be back steering the boat 4 hours after giving birth because there was no money if they didn’t haul cargo, and how the workers at Bournville would throw chocolate to the boat children. Talking to him was exactly what I needed at that time.
It started raining, so we stopped at the foot of the Camp Hill Locks for a bite of lunch. I also got to help out a party of Canadian hire boaters who were a bit lost and trying to climb up the side of the lock. We ran into them the next day and I’m glad that their enthusiasm for narrowboating wasn’t daunted by the experience.
I certainly don’t want to end this blog on a low point. We love exploring urban canals, and the BCN in particular, even though this year’s tally down the weed hatch was a baseball cap, a pair of Nike shorts, the wrapper from a multipack of Andrex and goodness knows how much plastic and weed. The water is crystal clear in parts, oily black in others. My copy of the Pearson’s guide is out on the back of the boat at all times because there is so much of interest to identify. I’ve probably taken 100 pictures to squirrel away in the memory banks, and we enjoy the surprises and the challenges. There is nowhere in the country where I’m more aware of how privileged we are to spend so much of our time on a living museum, a transport network that is 250 years old that was constructed not for our boating pleasure, but as part of the industrial revolution and is part of our history. The pretty and rural is just around the corner, and we are lucky to have so much variety.
