Looking up

It was pouring with rain first thing but we started early to get down the remaining twelve of the Marple locks before breakfast. We took turns running ahead, opening the locks in time for the boat’s arrival and looking back at its stately progress. There is something rather majestic about looking up at a boat in a lock.

There is also something rather majestic about watching a heron leave the trees, swoop in front of the boat then land on the bank and watch, still, as we pass.

We got out of the boat on the Marple aqueduct to look at the railway viaduct next to it. An impressive pairing. At Dukinfield junction we turned up the Huddersfield Narrow Canal towards the highest point on the English canal system. In the thirty years he has owned the boat, John has never brought it this way and he wanted to see if we would be able to fit it through the Standedge tunnel. Even if we could, we wouldn’t be able to continue beyond as the final locks are too short for the boat but I was happy to be heading towards the Peak District. As I was having a day off teaching I drove the boat through this edge of Manchester. The canal was dirty, the tunnels under Stalybridge shopping centre were blocky concrete, the views were of graffiti, coiled razor wire and derelict buildings.

The football fans on board were anxious to stop and we found a mooring just before 8. I was dispatched on the worse of the two bikes on board – stuck in top gear and with an impending puncture – in search of a pub showing the World Cup final. By the time I’d bounced over old setts with their tarmac covering patchily worn away, pedalled up steep hills, walked down the other side because I didn’t trust the bike’s one rattly brake to stop me at the traffic lights at the bottom, found a pub with a vast fuzzy screen then headed a mile in the wrong direction, I phoned back to discover that the others were already on their way to the pub, having worked out much more easily where to go using smartphone internet. Ah well. A gentle ride back to the boat for a quiet football-free evening.

(Marple on the Peak Forest Canal to Dukinfield Junction and up Huddersfield Narrow Canal to Millbrook.)