I am what Gregory calls a “negative previewer” and when Roger bought his bag of dope that day, I was seized by a not-entirely irrational fear that we were all going to get busted. And though Gregory didn’t like the fact that his brother was buying an illegal substance in a foreign country, he didn’t join me in my hand-wringing.
“It’s not like the canals are patrolled by narc boats,” he observed. “Stop worrying and enjoy the day.”
He had a point – we hadn’t seen any sign of law enforcement the entire trip. And the weather was preternaturally glorious for England, which had recorded its wettest summer ever that year. I tried to relax.
We were on our third day on the Trent-Mersey. We had found the canal to be alternately Arcadian
weirdly suburban
and industrial, with factories like Armitage-Shanks displaying stacks of urinals on palettes, waiting for shipment.
We had reached Haywood Junction late morning and, after Roger made his “purchase”, decided to take a detour up the Staffordshire-Worcester canal. The “Staffs and Worcs” (pronounced Wusts), as it’s called, proved to be a true throwback to an earlier bucolic era, with old mule towpaths still running alongside the 45-mile canal. They’re now used by walkers, including Caroline and me, who traded turns hiking alongside our boat as it puttered at its four-mile-an-hour speed limit.
View Larger Map
That night we moored in Tixall Wide, a pristine inlet on the canal, across a field from the Tixall Hall gatehouse where Mary Queen of Scots was briefly imprisoned in 1586 and where, now, one can stay the night for a modest fee to the National Trust. We feasted on a roasted local chicken and Italian rosé while pugnacious swans and their cygnets, looking for handouts, banged at our boat with their nasty long beaks. (I’ll never think of them again as majestic birds; they’re no more dignified than Jersey shore seagulls – and they hiss.)
The evening came to an enchanted close when a great blue heron swept down the canal, right past our boat. The setting sun, which was negotiating with an increasingly cloud-filled horizon, cast a rusty glow across its magnificent wingspread. We watched the bird land gracefully a dozen yards upstream from us and then disappear into the rushes.
The clouds gathered even more ominously the next day when we pulled out of the Wide, but the rain held off as we motored back to the Trent-Mersey and then past the lovely towns of Pasturefields, Weston-on-Trent, and Salt on our way to Stoke-on-Trent to visit the Wedgwood factory.
We stopped for lunch in Stone, an old market town known in earlier days for its beer-making, where we were told that we should not try to go further north.
“There’s flooding up Stafford way,” an obliging Yorkshireman informed us. “There’s a kilometer-long queue at the seven Barlaston locks, with people trying to get south before they close the canal altogether.”
We took his advice and, at the nearest winding hole, turned around the boat – which, being 60 feet long, was no easy feat. But Roger, even in an altered state, was an excellent pilot and the tenseness we felt as he manipulated the three-point turn quickly dissipated. By late afternoon Caroline, who had been looking at the canal guide, announced that we were approaching Sandon.
“I propose we stop there,” she said with the precise diction she had perfected during three decades of being one of the top literary editors in New York, “and see the Sandon estate. It was recommended to us by the woman at the wildlife trust at Wolseley.”
I waited for Roger to object – he was a driven captain and I knew he wanted to get as far as possible along the canal before 8 p.m., after which hour travel is forbidden. But he surprised me and quickly agreed to the suggestion, mooring the boat in front of the Sandon locks.
If only we had just kept going.
Read on.
LINKS
Armitage ShanksHaywood Junction
Tixall Hall Gatehouse
cygnets
Pasturefields
Weston-on-Trent
Barlaston
TRAVEL INFORMATION
Trent-Mersey Canal
Staffs & Worcs Canal
Salt
Stoke-on-Trent
Wedgwood
National Trust
Stone
Sandon Hall estate
Wildlife Trust at Wolseley Centre
1 comment:
Visitors to the Wedgwood site may be surprised to learn that the fine-china manufactury's founder, Josiah Wedgwood, played an important role in the 18th-century British abolitionist movement. He's mentioned, though not portrayed, in the 2007 film "Amazing Grace," about that movement's leader, William Wilberforce.
In one of those coincidental fillips that make travel seem more karmic than it really is, Caroline saw this movie on her return flight from the Midlands narrowboat adventure. Roger, however, did not, as his movie headset was on the fritz. That's OK, since Roger was never one for tasteful British costume drama.
Post a Comment