Solace Day 7: The Foxton Flight.

The highlight of the day was passing down Foxton Flight. Strictly speaking it isn't a single flight but 2 flights of 5 staircase locks with a short pound in the middle. A staircase lock is where you go straight from one lock into the next. This means two locks have only 3 sets of gates rather than 4 as usual.

Normally a passage down the locks takes 50 minutes to an hour. In our case it took 3 hours 20 minutes! I had better explain this wasn't because we went to sleep on the job or did anything wrong. We arrived just as a Canal and River Trust work boat entered the top lock of the top flight. The Lock Keeper told us there would be a delay of about an hour while they did the work and boats were brought up from the bottom. Boats work the locks in batches of up to 5 or 6 as this saves water. I don't know what went wrong with their work schedule but scraping vegetation of the wooden gates and bringing 3 boats up delayed us by about 2 and a half hours.

An interesting if short lived feature near the locks is the remains of the inclined plane, this was built opened in 1900 to allow speedier passage of wide beam boats as the locks being only 7 feet wide limited traffic to narrow boats. It was mothballed in 1911 and over the years decayed and was removed. The locks had been running about 87 years when the plane opened and are still going today.

Apart from Clickychick and her camera the shot shows some of the many Gongoozlers (canal idle spectators) who are attracted by the spectacle.