A tiring day, mostly because of Ashted locks

Monday 3^rd October; Catherine de Barnes to Ashted top lock

Apart from the occasional plane taking off from the crack of dawn it was a quiet night, with no road noise and no acorns bouncing off the roof!  Before we left we took Meg for a walk along the footpath that Dave found last night, as she wouldn’t have an opportunity for getting off the boat for a while today.  We left at about 9.45, well wrapped up as it was chilly down in the cutting.

Sunshine up there somewhere but very cold down here!

Leaf fall is just beginning and we had to go into neutral a few times to drop leaves off the prop. There are no locks for miles till you get closer to the city centre, but there’s always something to see on a canal.

Exotica in Elmdon Heath

Fairy door in Solihull

There are various places where you would think it would be fine to moor, but there are no rings or Armco, and the towpath is all hard edging and ‘improved’ so you couldn’t bang a pin in anyway.  Although the canal is passing through the suburbs of Birmingham there are some pretty bits to see, and some interesting bits of old infrastructure like these poles to support electric cables either side of the canal.

We haven’t been this way for a few years, and we remember Tyseley as being a wasteland of demolished industry on both sides of the canal.  Not so any more, though it’s not exactly pretty.

Modern Tyseley

As we got closer to Birmingham the usual rubbish started to appear in the canal, though it wasn’t too bad and we didn’t have to go down the weed hatch. We hadn’t seen any boats and barely anyone on the towpath, but sometimes there must be other canal users –

There were signs 2 miles each side of ‘The Ackers’ warning you to look out for canoes, but nothing doind today.  Further on there was a climbing wall, apparently adapted from the dry ski slope as marked on Nicholson’s!  Soon afterwards we were approaching the top of Camp Hill locks.  And amazingly there was the first boat of the day just emerging.  They were Canadians, on their hire boat for 4 weeks and heading back down to Wyvern at Leighton Buzzard.

They had HATED Birmingham and were desperate to know some pretty canals for their next trip.  The locks of course were all in our favour now, or only needed topping up, so we were soon down.  Meg and I walked, admiring the church

Church of the Holy Trinity

and collecting pocketfuls of conkers (or chasing them) half-way down.  At the bottom lock we started to see a lot of graffiti work promoting the Weapon Free Movement, and WFB (Weapon Free Birmingham) in particular,

The air was full of traffic and construction noise, but there was better stuff to see too.

Toadflax

I got back on the boat at Bordesley Junction, beginning to feel a bit hungry by now as it was lunchtime!  We trickled gently through Warwick Bar

and round the junction with Typhoo basin.  And then we came to Ashted locks.  The paddles were in very poor condition and horrendously stiff to work.  At locks 4 and 5 work was progressing with preparation for a bridge over the canal for HS2 (thank you Waterway Routes for that info).

Dave spotted a Co-op shop sign on the side of one of the City Uni buildings which we noted for later.  We negotiated Ashted tunnel without incident, apart from having to pass a 70-footer floating about in the pound below it, which was very awkward.  There is more work going on above the tunnel, with a massive corkscrew device to drive holes for foundations.  (I spoke to two of the surveyors the day after to find out what they were building – 800 apartments in 4 blocks, using both sides of the top lock).

Then at last we arrived at the moorings by Aston University and gratefully stopped for a rather late lunch.  My back ached after those wretched locks.  We walked Meg back down the locks to check out the Co-op (the supermarket is under the college building) and look at the HS2 works, but you couldn’t see any more than we had from the canal.

8½ miles, 11 locks, Curzon Street tunnel, Ashted tunnel.