Tuesday 18th May
You know that farm we were moored up near last night? Well, it turned out to be a dog boarding kennels! We should have realised when we kept hearing dogs barking in what we thought was the barn of this farm. They kept on barking intermittently all evening and again early this morning! We only twigged when we saw two girls walking all these dogs in the field this morning!
To compound the felony, when we turned the corner on our continued journey towards Macclesfield this morning, we discovered miles of more secluded moorings! We comforted ourselves with the thought that they were probably too shallow to get in. Hmm – probably not though. We rushed into tonight’s moorings on the advice of a woman already moored here who told us it was really shallow further on, I expect the same thing will happen tomorrow as well!
That aside, it has been a beautiful day and we have come another 7 miles. The canal passes through only a small edge of Macclesfield with its huge Hovis Mill (nice, took photo) and Adelphi Mill (not so nice, didn’t take photo), high embankment and another ‘snake’ bridge (got photos of them at Congleton already). We had some difficulty mooring up in Macclesfield, as usual it was too shallow. We thought we had cracked it to begin with but discovered we were in the waterpoint mooring and had to move in case anyone wanted to fill up. We did a bit of shunting and managed to get in just before the waterpoint. As we were leaving the boat to go to the shops (yes really!) some grass cutting contractors, who were cutting the verges along the canal and towpath, stopped us and said their mate would be along soon to strim and he wasn’t always very careful near moored boats. This can be a problem with contractors who do the job they have been told to do without thinking about the consequences. There are quite a few incidences of boats having paint chipped and even windows broken as a result of stones flying up during strimming. As we had had so much difficulty getting in to the mooring we didn’t want to move so we decided to take a chance that we would get back from the shops before he got there and we did. In fact we had moved on quite a long way before we saw him ambling up the towpath.
There is some wonderful countryside around here and we are now approaching the foothills of the Pennines. We are over 500ft above sea level since we came up Bosley Locks. A lot of the canal is on embankments and aquaducts crossing the valleys and the views are superb. You can even see Wales from here!
