At last it's hot enough for ice-creams

Sunday 4th June; bridge 33 to above Foxton locks between bridge 59 and 60

Another lovely sunny morning, with the light cloud dispersing and the weather set fair.  It’s a lovely mooring here, like many along the Leicester Line, open with a nice view.

We had a long cruise this morning without much incident.  We heard the odd yellowhammer, some reed warblers (although they may have been sedge warblers, but I couldn’t see them down in the reeds), and possibly a whitethroat.  Plenty of flowers to enjoy, like these wild roses.

We went under Downtown bridge, sounding as though it should be quite a busy area, but no – it is the site of a mediaeval village, long abandoned.

Nothing there?  A lot can apparently be seen from the air.  Just over 40 years ago, a Boy Scout group, the 28th Leicester, of Wigston, unearthed 3ft-thick walls and found evidence of skilfully-created land drainage.  The article I found (the Leicester Mercury) inplied it was abandoned because of the plague.

We cruised on past North Kilworth marina, where we collected Bonjour nearly a year ago, past the busy Wharf, and under the road bridge back out into the peace and quiet.  At times it was a green corridor with the sun filtering through the trees.

We had hoped to pull in after the Husbands Bosworth tunnel to visit the village, but the towpath edge was not good, in fact it was collapsing a little further along.  So no Sunday paper this week.  We stopped for lunch when we were able, then moved on towards Foxton locks, mooring a little way past bridge 59 where the towpath was relatively quiet.  We had a lovely walk with Meg down the locks, which were quite busy and the towpath was crowded with gongoozlers.  They were queueing to have their photo taken with the boat-horse and his lad. 

We walked on down to the bottom, as we had rubbish to dispose of and were delighted to see that there is a separate compound for your recycling.  We’ll deal with that tomorrow.  Of course we patronised the ice-cream kiosk at the top of the flight, and checked the books for sale too, though nothing took our fancy.  We sat in the sun by the top side pond to enjoy our ice creams.

Just wait, little dog!

There are several sculptures along the locks, depicting aspects of boating around 1900.

See you tomorrow

It was much quieter as we walked back to the boat, the gongoozlers on their way home for their tea and the horse and his lad were on their own at last.

The boat was warm when we got back.  What a change from the last few days, lovely!  But the evening soon grew cool.  Glad we hadn’t been planning a barbecue.  Unfortunately there was no internet signal available on my phone, and only a weak one on Dave’s.

10 miles, Husband’s Bosworth tunnel