Cables and a cuckoo

Saturday 8^th July; Iron Trunk to Stanton Low

Before we left this morning, Dave took advantage of the fine weather to walk Meg in the other direction along the Great Ouse – except that he didn’t, as instead he went to find the old locks that were used to cross the river before the aqueduct was built.  He hadn’t taken his phone, so no pictures! That’s one for our return trip.  We were off a little earlier than usual as rain and thunder is forecast for midday.

Across the Iron Trunk

 

The Great Ouse from the aqueduct

The rain started almost as soon as we had crossed – clearly my fault for having done some washing this morning!  The rain was steady, though not heavy, and had stopped by the time we were approaching Wolverton where we moored right by the footbridge that leads up to the town.  Luckily I took my waterproof when I went shopping, as there was a heavy shower on my way to the shops.  I got some veg in the Village Food Centre (a long thin shop opposite the Tesco street entrance) which had a wonderful range of tropical veg including many different types of chilli.  I got some beautiful large plum tomatoes.  Then Tesco for the rest.  As I toiled up the ramp back to street level with my trolley, I was confronted by a striking mural.

Clarence Gill (1948 – 2020) came to Britain from India as a baby and was a notable member of the performing arts scene in Milton Keynes.  He led a successful campaign to put up nesting boxes in the town, hence the swifts and swallows in the mural.  Then on the way back I saw this embedded in the pavement.

Buttons always get lost in a laundry

It was very hot and sultry as I lugged the trolley down the steps and over the footbridge.  Dave was still sitting at the table, working on cables and connectors.  We thought the chap on the boat in front was shouting, but no, he was just outside chatting to a passer-by.   It’s like a canyon here, with the canal running between a high wall on one side and flats on the other,. Voices echo around magnified hugely.  A group of young teenage lads stopped to rest on the benches – they were on their D of E expedition, and several were grateful for a refill of their water bottles – it’s very hot and they had full packs, and their next water point was at Willen, some way along the canal.

We moved on after lunch in spite of the showers, taking several photos of the amazing railway mural on the offside as we passed.  We are amazed that this never seems to be vandalised – or is it just that it is easy to paint over graffiti when your colour scheme is black and white?

We wanted to moor at Stanton Low, but we feared it would be very crowded on a summer weekend, so we stopped a hundred yards or so before the bend, beside the woods.  It was hot and sultry – not much sun, but we were in reasonable shade, and Dave carried on with his cables and connectors for a while before we walked up to Stanford Low and across the butterfly-filled meadow to the ruins of St Peter’s.

There are still some memorials in the graveyard, marking the last resting place of members of the Selby family.

The church is tiny, but of course a posh family would have had a front-row pew when they attended services.  The riff-raff would have looked through the ‘squint’ to see the altar

Taken across the chancel

or at least that’s what the interpretation boards implied.  I found a strange thing on one of the walls – a collection of live snails.  It looked as though someone had gone round picking them off the walls and laid them out in a group.  How odd.

So I put them back in the cool to stop them drying out.  We could hear a cuckoo calling in the woods as we followed a broad mown path back to bridge 76 and home along the towpath.

Across Church Field

 

3 ½ miles, Great Ouse (Iron Trunk) aqueduct, Grafton St aqueduct.