Should I be grumpy that Canal & River Trust have not fixed Bosley Locks?

In early May a boat crashed into the bottom gate of Bosley Locks. Bosley are a flight of 12 locks on the Macclesfield canal that raise a boat 118 feet over just half a mile, taking you from the bottom of the canal to the top. They have been closed since then and I am becoming irritated by Canal & River Trust (CRT) not fixing them.

The problem with the locks being out of action are that boaters like us cannot get up to Macclesfield and the Peak Forest Canal without them. There is a theoretical alternative route through Manchester but the Bridgewater Canal is closed due to a breach a couple of years ago, and the Marple flight of locks at the other end of the Macclesfield has just closed due to a broken balance beam.

I have some sympathy with CRT. The damage to the gate was extensive and exacerbated an existing problem with the gates leaking. However, they took weeks before deciding to drain the lock for a proper examination, and then a while to install scaffolding and fix the issue.

As you probably know, we pootled along the Caldon Canal for a while and had a lovely time, but last week they said it would be open at 4pm on Tuesday so we set off. Then, at 1pm on Tuesday CRT sent a notice that they had found another issue and would not be opening. Next update is Friday but I am not holding our breath. We have winded (turned around) and come back to Kidsgrove.

I don’t have a problem with the gate failure. Stuff happens, especially with two hundred year old locks. But I think they should have found the second problem when they examined the lock weeks ago. And I think their communication should have been a lot better throughout.

But we do not live on a boat to get grumpy. We enjoyed our trip up to Congleton, and I had a lovely afternoon looking at the museum and town hall there. It must have been such a dirty smelly mill town a hundred years ago, but is now bright and feels optimistic. And we are currently moored in one of our favourite places, just north of the Harecastle tunnel, where iron ore in the soil makes the canal run red, and the birds seem to sing all day long.

There is another lovely route down the “heartbreak hill” flight of 31 locks towards Middlewich, so we will probably head that way when the rain stops. A good friend is visiting us next week from New Zealand via South America, so we do not want to get too far anyway.

And who knows, maybe on Friday they will tell us Bosley is open again. Life’s too short to be grumpy.