12th to 22nd June

We left Banbury on Thursday 12^th ,

What a contrast : busy Banbury...

...isolated Kings Sutton lock

 having finally dispensed with the car (or so we thought…) and made our way to nearby Cropredy, meeting up again with  Jenny, Richard, Joseph and Samuel who live in the village. 

Traffic jam on the Oxford Canal

The Oxford has many swing bridges, which fortunately for the boater are mostly left raised, but rounding a bend one morning we were greeted by the sight of a truck-full of cows being unloaded, and had to screech to a halt, metaphorically speaking! The summer season is well under way, with lots of boats out and about in addition to many permanently moored boats, leading to some tight squeezes in places.

 

Not much room to pass

Unlucky Friday 13^th saw us reach Fenny Compton wharf, from where we had to make an emergency dash to fetch the car again, in order to transport Benny to the vet with an attack of cystitis (unlike humans, this is a problem for gentlemen  rather than lady cats, and can be serious) 

The invalid

  Happily for him he responded quickly to treatment, but unhappily for us we were £100 poorer!

Sunday was Roger’s ?? birthday so we had a day off, continuing to Braunston on Monday, and on Tuesday set off up the Leicester arm of the Grand Union to moor beyond Watford Staircase Locks. This section of the Leicester line is very rural, once you have escaped from the noise of the M1, and we have had a lovely time pottering along in the sunshine, admiring the acrobatics of the swallows, a second wave of fluffy ducklings and moorhen chicks, lambs , calves, foals – and more unexpectedly, a colony of bats in Crick Tunnel, and a grass-snake sunning itself at the edge of a lock, where it slithered into the water and swam away

Grass-snake

. After the bustle of the Oxford canal, which is always pretty busy, the traffic has been light, and we negotiated Foxton Locks  without too much delay. Like the Watford flight, these are ‘staircase’ locks, in this case 10 locks in two sets of 5, where the bottom gates of one lock are the top gates of the next and the water (plus your boat) goes from one lock straight into the following one. 

Foxton Locks

The Foxton flight takes you 75ft downhill, and for the steerer there is the unnerving sensation that you are sailing off the edge of a cliff, as you can only see sky/tree-tops beyond the front of the boat 60 ft away. From 1900 to 1911 boats were transported up and down the steep hill floating in huge counterbalanced tanks on an Inclined Plane (sadly, long since demolished) The site is well worth a visit; there is a small but very interesting museum in the old boilerhouse (http://canalrivertrust.org.uk/directory/52/foxton-locks)

On Friday 20^th we were joined at Debdale Wharf by Ann and Sue for a day’s boating before Ann heads back to Auckland on Sunday, and at the end of the expedition Dave miraculously managed to find us in the midst of the Leicestershire countryside to take them home again.

Sue steering, while Ann and Roger
close the gate

Jean, Ann and Sue (and Benny) resting
after a hard day 

Since then we have travelled as far as Aylestone meadows on the outskirts of Leicester, where once again we have stopped for a Sunday break.  We’ve been reading up about the Trent, which is a river not to be taken lightly, by the sound of it. More of that next week!