Mum and I had a wander on the Caldon Canal from Etruria Junction to Emma Bridgewater Factory in May 2022.
The Caldon Canal is 18 miles long and runs from Etruria, Stoke on Trent, to Froghall, near Uttoxeter. The canal also branches off to Leek, a town in Staffordshire. It originally was one of the branches of the Mersey Canal Company, at the time, and formed part of the said canal. Opened in 1779 and despite not being officially closed, the usage of the canal declined in the 20th Century and subsequent restoration took place. In 1974, the main line to Froghall was completed and the Leek branch soon after.
We started on the Trent and Mersey Canal at Festival Park in Etruria, and we walked to towards the junction where the Caldon Canal begins. There we continued on until we reached the Bridgewater Factory Shop. It is a pleasant place to stop and have a drink, admire the grounds’ gardens and buy some earthenware.
The two miles or so stretch on the canal is calm and green with the canal running through Hanley Park and its cast iron bridges. This was enhanced by the sunny and warm weather we had that day. We walked back from the Bridgewater Factory shop to the park. The park is nice and spacious though lacking in facilities. The Pavilion, the main building at the park, was empty and there probably was a café in there but closed a long time ago. It is a pity as the Pavilion is a beautiful building and the current state sadly resemble the emptiness and its lifeless ambiance.
It was a pleasant walk along a small stretch of the Caldon Canal and we plan to explore more of this interesting waterway on a future trip.
The photographs in this article are of multiple exposure using the Snapseed App on my mobile device and the App enables double exposure of photographs and the use of filtering.
By Dawn Smallwood
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Paul Robert Watson has been a journalist all his working life, and has now written his first novel. 'Cut to the Chase' is partially set on the canal system, in and around Braunston and the Tunnel.
The main character is an ex policeman who lives on a narrowboat, and is on the run from corrupt police and a gang of drug runners. He makes his unlikely escape on his old narrowboat, Longfellow.
How it all came about is a little hazy. At some point, I must have agreed to the idea of a narrow boat holiday. Certainly, I was not the prime motivator and red wine was probably involved.
So it was that I found myself in a darkened room watching an instruction video on the basics of boat handling, how to negotiate a lock, mooring a vessel and the like.
That was Easter fourteen years ago at Market Harborough, then the base for hire company Canal Times, With me were my wife, Sue, and daughter, Rosie, her friend, Hannah, and her mum and dad, Linda and Dean.
Although we didn't know it at the time, we were about to embark on a journey that would lead us to travel, if not the length and breadth of the waterway network, then large sections in the north west and Midlands.
We emerged blinking into the daylight, were shown a model of a lock, then ushered aboard Hartley's Best, carrying our gear for a four-night trip. Briefly we were informed of the boat's operation. Push the throttle lever forward to go forward, back to go back; steer left to go right and visa versa. Oh, and reversing is tricky, but you'll get the hang of it. Honestly, to this day, I never really have.
Our instructor rather hastily stepped off at the entrance to the marina and we were left to our own devices.
The secret of happy cruising, at least in the early stages, is that you have to be prepared to leave your dignity on the quayside. Forget about looking nonchalantly professional like a seasoned boater and embrace the laughter you will inevitably hear from the gongoozling crowds, just like I did.
Yes, I was the first to get wet, left clinging to a top rail while my feet dangled in the water. Why did the girls draw the blind as my face appeared outside the kitchen window? All I could hear was the sound of embarrassed chortles.
A swing bridge? All right, we can manage that. But who's getting off to operate it? The sequence, so blindingly simple, had to be worked out for our first effort.
Turning for the first time was also a challenge and the bottom of Foxton Locks is hardly the ideal place to learn. After a display of cringeworthy ineptitude, we managed to moor.
Even for experienced boaters, Foxton can be the cause for some head-scratching. Long, steep, with staircase locks, your readers will be all too familiar with the scenario. We read the instructions and, with the aid of the lock-keepers on duty, we made it to the top. It felt as though we had scaled Everest, such was the sense of achievement.
On we cruised. With no locks, this was easy. Through Husbands Bosworth tunnel, then a stride across the fields to the White Hart, all the while becoming more enamoured with this boating life.
A better executed turn and an excursion to Welford on the way home provided the crew with greater confidence and Foxton was negotiated without incident. After good food and drink at the Black Horse, we returned to Harborough.
The trip, as they say, had seemed like a good idea at the time. And it really was.
Within six months we had become shareholders in Sometimes, an Ownerships vessel. You'll be familiar with that particular sorry tale but the syndicate survived without incurring too many losses, unlike some less fortunate.
I had become a committed boater rather than an accidental one.
So why not employ some of the experiences, sights sounds and scenes in a story that I had long hoped to write?
And that's how Cut to the Chase became a reality.
the book
Cut to the Chase, some of which is set on the canal network, is available as an e-book from the Kindle store.
It is an adventure story, in which the main character, John Clubb, finds himself at the centre of a web of police corruption and drug-running.
Part of the story is based in and around Braunston and the tunnel, of which I have personal experience, having been a canal boat owner for the last 13 or so years.
The basic premise is that Clubb is on the run from a gang of drug smugglers and a corrupt policeman. He escapes their attention but is pursued from Scotland to the south east of England and thence to the Midlands.
An ex-policeman himself, he is aided by a former colleague, Brian Digbeth.
He escapes on his old narrow boat, Longfellow, aboard which he attempts - very slowly, naturally - to evade his pursuers. The plot eventually takes him to Scotland, where he is able to assist the police in tracking down the drug-runners and corrupt officers. And, of course, there is a twist in the tale.
The novel is published as an e-book on amazon under the name of Robert Watson and will cost £2.35, although it will be available free for a limited period. A paperback version is planned if reaction is favourable.
Spring for boaters is an optimistic season and a time when we emerge from our winter hibernation, looking forward to longer days and enjoyable cruising. Many of us will be planning our Summer travels and hoping for some drier weather at least, sunshine a bonus! Picture those days when the sunlight streams through the boat and the condensation disappears.
Once those double figure temperatures return we will soon be cooking outside again and our Cobb barbecue will be back to full use, not just for barbecuing but so much more! For now I am enjoying some wild garlic pickings and soon the hawthorn buds, dandelions, nettles and elderflowers will be abundant.
We are all much more conscious about cutting down on food waste, using every part of fresh produce where possible and packaging must always be minimal. I used to buy food bags for storing dry foods, baking and chilled items, now I recycle bakery produce bags and if anything should happen to be in a plastic carton I will use it to keep leftovers in the fridge, or seed trays for my Spring plantings.
Try to wash and scrub root vegetables instead of peeling, there are many nutrients in the outer skin, use the outer leaves of greens for soups, the inner part of the stalk end of a broccoli stem is tender and tasty too. If I do peel the veggies, the skins make lovely oven crisps, tossed in a little oil and seasoning and baked on tray in a hot oven.
If bread looks a bit past it for a sandwich, make into breadcrumbs for stuffing, burgers and patties, they make a great topping for macaroni or cauliflower cheese. Fry slices in a little olive oil and seasoning and cut into croutons for a soup or casserole topping or toss in a salad, or make a simple bread and butter pudding.
With Easter coming soon I have a few favourite recipes to share, ideas using the whole chicken, a lovely lamb recipe, some gluten free polenta recipes and of course an Easter sweet treat. I’m a fan of chicken thigh meat in place of breast fillet but sometimes there is a larger fat/sinew content, thus more waste and less value for money, although Rosie our dog enjoys any chicken discard treats. If you buy skin on chicken thighs, the skins can be used to make chicken cracking based on the pork scratching.
An occupational hazard of spending too much time rummaging through old newspapers is that you become somewhat de-sensitised to the macabre as, such is the nature of journalism, it’s the grim and the grisly that sells the most papers.
This time of year is miserable enough without me talking about death and destruction, so instead I’ve pulled a selection of the more amusing incidents that have occurred over the years on the water.
‘Amusing’ is of course a subjective word, and I don’t think the Wolverhampton policemen in 1906 were laughing when they were sent to arrest a chicken thief, tricked into climbing into a boat's cabin and locked in by their helpful informants.
We can presume that the boat, being unlocked, must have been a day boat, and we can also presume that she had a small stove on board that was probably lit, because the “jokers,” as the newspaper described them, poured a bucket of water down the chimney before pushing her out into the middle of the canal for good measure.
How long the policemen were stuck in the little cabin for we don’t know, but it was long enough for the merry pranksters to go to the pub and imbibe enough alcohol to think it was a good idea to tell everyone what they’d done, and eventually someone had the presence of mind to go and tell a different copper, who rescued his colleagues.
You’ll perhaps be unsurprised to hear that the police quite regularly participated in ‘amusing incidents’ that tickled the fancy of the newspapers and while it’s true that the boaters as a whole didn’t trust or respect their authority, neither did much of the rest of the population either. In 1878, the Manchester Evening News reported with ill-disguised glee of a policeman getting “belaboured…with great vigour” by a boatwoman and her children.
Emma Carter was steering a boat being pulled by a horse with collar sores on its shoulders, and she threw stones at it to try and make it go on. A policeman stopped her and took the horse away under the relatively new Cruelty to Animals Act and tried to make her come with him to the police station. She refused, arguing the boat needed to get ahead and took up the tow herself. The policeman came back with reinforcements so she jumped on and pushed the boat into the canal, forcing the policemen to grab what appears to have been a small coracle type of boat so they could get to her.
The newspaper delightedly added the that the little boat was half full of water so the policeman took off his shoes and socks before getting in.
The brave officers made it to the boat, where Emma picked up the cabin shaft and tried to fend them off while getting increasingly belligerent. The men managed to board the boat, at which point she and all the children “seized thick sticks” and started whacking them. The boat had drifted close enough to the bank during this so when Emma had her stick taken from her and she desperately grabbed the bread knife instead, someone managed to take it from her before things turned ugly. It perhaps says a lot about the hidden details of this incident however that Emma was only fined rather than being properly arrested.
Violence wasn’t the only think that caused LOLZ; thinly camouflaged under a veneer of indignance, nudity was a hot topic. The Bridgewater canal served as both a transport route and the worlds biggest bathtub, and residents of Stockton Heath were subjected to the sight of men and boys in the canal “without proper bathing costumes” so often that they made a protest in 1913, demanding that the canal company enforce the ‘no bathing’ signs. The newspaper feigned horror as it described how the bathers didn’t bother with swimming costumes or even with towels, instead dying off by “racing up and down the canal bank naked”. History doesn’t relate how the bathers and the boats interacted, although given the nude condition of the bathers one would presume ‘carefully’, lest an irate boatwoman decided to take aim with a mopstick.
Nudity and sporting daring-do came together in one gem of a tale in 1909 when a telegram for Manchester United Football Grounds came through with only 15 minutes for the messenger to deliver it. Faced with an impossible task, he told his tale of woe to a fellow messenger who volunteered to strip off and swim the message across the canal with the telegram tied to his head like a hat, which he duly did. For some reason, quite probably to do with heroics, the original messenger also decided to strip off and go with the telegram across the water, and the bemused site manager was met with two nude boys dripping water in the foyer, proudly delivering the telegram with one minute to spare.
Your Canal Boat, a Community Interest Company whose mission is to activate underutilised canal side spaces, is organising a floating market with up to 8 boats to trade pop-up style, continuously, for two months across West London this Spring.
With CRT appproval of our final schedule pending, we anticipate space for five more traders beginning with our first market at Uxbridge 1 May.
Boats currently subscribed include 'Molly Anna', our main entertainment and broadcast centre, 'Shorewaters', serving delicious traditional Indian dishes and 'Winnimax', a state of the art recording studio offering demo recordings for performing artists.
With additional providers of food and services, we aim to create a festival-like atmosphere that generates new interest in overlooked locations, culminating in stakeholder engagement sessions that encourage residents to effectively “own” and manage them going forward.
If that sounds like your kind of “trouble”, organisers invite you to get on board.
Plans
The flotilla will rendezvous for the first week of May in Uxbridge before travelling to the Hanwell Hootie - UK´s biggest free music festival, where Molly Anna serves as the official ¨busking boat¨. The ‘’village’ then spends three weeks at two Brentford locations, before travelling back up the Hanwell Flight to the Hayes Festival where they will end two months of trading at Alperton.
What happens thereafter depends on public response and the collective decision of participants.
Jeet Bahal is one of the flotilla´s pioneers, a 70-year old marine engineer who has circumnavigated the globe 7 times, he passionately believes that a canal boat village is as appropriate for London as those he marvelled at in Thailand and Cambodia. Jeet brings his boat Shorewaters, his curry recipes, and deep connections with West London’s Sikh community to help achieve it as a reality.
But what should we call this experiment in perpetual canal boat festivity? A canal boat village that pops up, casts a magical spell and disappears again?
Jeet opined for the name “Brigadoon,” a nod to the Broadway play about a mythical Scottish Highland Village that materializes every 100 years. What better analogy for a floating ‘village’ that relocates, popping up from week to week along the canal?
Brigadoon suggests marvel, mystery and a fleeting presence. In Hollywood’s 1954 version, Gene Kelly is an American who stumbles into Brigadoon and falls in love.
- Does he stay with the woman he loves or should he return to his lived reality of a ‘real world’ in New York?
And will this canal boat village be similarly enchanting? Will people follow along to wherever it moves in accordance with continuous cruising requirements?
Woody Travis Walker believes they will. Woody, a classically trained actor, has sailed on tall ships and run music sessions on the Golden Hinde. He looks forward to hosting a podcast that promotes the project with music, theatre & interviews, or as he describes it, “the poetry of the waterways”.
With the help of the Punjabi Theatre Academy that poetry will likely include a South Asian accent. Recognised as the first thespians to bring the story of the Southall riots to the stage, the Punjabi Theatre Academy will utilise Brigadoon as a platform to solicit immigrant memories of the renovation of Heathrow Airport, from a wartime facility into London´s principal terminal.
Families are encouraged to bring their elders to be interviewed and photographed at public engagement sessions in Uxbridge, Hayes, Hanwell, Brentford, Southall and Alperton. Collected content will be transformed into a Bollywood style production for the following Year 2 village flotilla.
Sir Tony Robinson, England´s most beloved popular historian, has contributed a video encouraging people to get involved and bring the program into the heart of London.
To be a hit in the The Big Smoke, the village needs a coffee service and beverages, and services from massage to haircut to tattoo, are invited to consider joining.
Write admin@yourcanalBoat.com to learn more..
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