Working boat

We stopped in Macclesfield. I was very keen to see the silk weavers’ cottages with their large-windowed attics and the mills built to accommodate the Jacquard looms that reached here in the 1820s. But after finding a photocopying place then the tourist information office it was time to get back to the boat. I need a trip back one day.

After lunch, a working boat drew alongside, selling diesel, coal and kindling, maps, mooring pins, windlasses and boat-made rope fenders. John had bought some diesel this morning at the Macclesfield boatyard but was happy to support a working boat so we filled up.

What happened for the rest of today? I have no idea. I have lost my sense of time. These days of travelling slowly are finished so quickly, the hours speeding like minutes. The day gets light, I get up, we share a meal, we share driving the boat and working the locks, I prepare and teach lessons, the students learn and do homework, we eat lunch on the hoof, we share driving the boat and working the locks, we have our evening meal and it is dusk. Quicker than that.

This evening after dusk we continued to drive.  Just after we’d turned from the Macclesfield to the Trent and Mersey Canal, at lock 42, we discovered that Clear Water lock at Malkin’s Bank, number 63, would be shut tomorrow from 6 to 10am. We agreed to carry on until we’d got through it. I walked ahead to fill locks, many of which were two locks in parallel. Even at 10.30 the orange streaks in the north west sky gave enough light in the darkness to enable me easily to find my way on the pale gravel path and to choose the fuller of the two locks. And to catch breath-stopping reflections of silhouetted trees in the perfectly still, orange canal water.

We pushed on and on until I was seeing only by moonlight.

From Pierpoint Bridge we could see and hear the M6 motorway crossing the canal ahead of us. Orange, red and white light-strings of lorries roared past. Alien and mesmerising.

Soon after, at 1am, I went to bed but I heard the bumps and water-flow of lock 63 at 2am, then everyone else coming in to sleep.

(Macclesfield Canal to Hardings Wood. Turn onto Trent and Mersey Canal to Malkins Bank.)