Our plan for today was to go down to Shardlow and on to the Trent, then go to look at the Shardlow marina where Loulie is thinking of holding her 60th birthday event. We would then come back up the canal and start our journey back towards Fradley Junction and eventually Birmingham. Before we set off we fed the dogs and then took them for another walk down the cycle track towards the Trent, so that I could see it.
We got under way at about 9:15, and within a mile we reached the first of three locks before we get into Shardlow. As with the ones yesterday these locks are large with sharp undertows, though the final one, just above Shardlow, is relatively shallow. Having passed that one we proceeded slowly through Shardlow itself. This is very much a canal village, and unlike Preston Brook at the other end, the distinctive buildings, especially warehouses, have been retained, in some cases being converted into houses or flats. One house, with a long lawn bordering the canal, had a miniature railway track curving around it – the trains must have been inside their shed as we could not see them.
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| Final milepost at Shardlow |
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| Flood control gates and warning lights |
At the end of the village we passed through a set of flood gates – normally open, as they were today, but there for protection if the river rises. After passing a marina with a lot of moored boats, we went under bridge 1, the end of a sequence which started at bridge 213 up near Dutton. Just beyond that we came to the final lock which would let us down to the Trent. In this lock we were joined by another boat, Daedalus, a nice looking 70-footer with a tug bow, owned by a couple who spend the year aboard, though they have a house down in Essex. Having another boat made the lock more comfortable, though it was still difficult, with one of the paddles not working. We let them go ahead of us out of the lock, then followed them out onto the river.
This is a very different proposition from the narrow water we saw first up at Burston. After following a channel out of the lock for a few hundred yards you come to Derwent Mouth, effectively a crossroads. On your right the Trent itself flows in, and on the left the river Derwent emerges – this is a fair size, though not navigable by canal craft. Straight ahead the combined river flows downstream, and we followed it. It is now a hundred yards or more across, and flowing quite swiftly. We went under a substantial pipe bridge, which supplies water to the city of Leicester, and then under the M1 motorway. Just after that the river swung away to the left over a large weir, and we kept straight ahead into Sawley.
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| Derwent Mouth - the Trent coming in from the right |
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| Looking up the Trent |
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| Derwent Mouth - the river Derwent on the left |
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| Following Daedalus towards the pipe bridge |
Sawley, with a large marina and other moorings, sits on what is effectively a short stretch of canal, with the Trent looping around it to the north. At the top, where we went in, there is a flood lock, which is left open at normal times, so the water is at the same level as the river. At the other end there is a lock, manned by lock keepers and worked by machinery, which lets you down again onto the river (whose level has dropped when it went over the weir).
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| Sawley |
The river seemed even wider as we emerged, though maybe the channel is just more spread out. There was a plastic bottle stationary in the middle – it wasn’t obviously a buoy, but it was either stuck on a very shallow spot or moored to the bottom, and I spent some time deciding which side of it looked more like the main channel. Fortunately, if there was a wrong side I picked the right one. The river curved broadly to the left and then back to the right, and we came to the crossroads which would be the limit of our journey this time.
The crossroads
Straight ahead the Trent continued downstream, trending north until it becomes tidal, and eventually meets the Ouse to form the Humber Estuary. Up that way you can link up with the Yorkshire canals, and eventually reach Leeds and the Leeds & Liverpool canal.
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Mouth of the Erewash
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To the left is the mouth of the Erewash Canal, which runs about a dozen miles north, between Derby and Nottingham. There are proposals to open further lengths into the foothills of the Peak District, but this will always be a dead end, unless the Derby Canal which I mentioned in yesterday’s blog is restored.
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| The Trent continues, with the Grand Union opening to the right |
On the right is the beginning of the Leicester Section of the Grand Union Canal. This runs a long way south, through the centre of Leicester, and eventually meets up with the main line of the Grand Union, which comes down from the centre of Birmingham.
All three of these routes offer a lot of interest, and we would hope to travel them some day, but for now this was as far as we were going. We turned in a wide arc, very easy in the open river, and headed back upstream. We passed a large boat on the way, not seagoing I guess but bigger than you would meet on a canal. We went back up the automated lock and out the flood gates to Derwent Mouth. At this point we had planned to turn up the Trent again to visit Shardlow marina, but we reckoned that it would take a couple of hours at least, and time was already getting on. So we headed back up the locks through Shardlow and beyond, and in the end we moored in the exact spot at Weston Cliffs that we had left this morning – though facing the opposite direction, of course.
We have now completed the “End Run” – top to bottom of the Trent and Mersey, and the main objective of this trip. But now we were thinking about the second mission, to visit the centre of Birmingham. I was carefully counting back from the jump-off spot we had been advised to use for the final day into Birmingham, to make sure that we would reach it in time.
TODAY: 8:00 HOURS. 14.2 MILES. 10 LOCKS.
Voyage: 39:10 HOURS. 71.3 MILES. 45 LOCKS.
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