CRT – Pete's Blog

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.

We are back on Narrowboat Thuis this week. We have missed boating these past few weeks. Our son Rob and fiancée Alessa borrowed the boat last week and took it half way round the Four Counties Ring. They took good care of it and finished at Market Drayton. So with some shuffling of cars, we met them there and are now cruising back to the marina in Stone. We need to be back for next Thursday which should have given us plenty of time, but on a Narrowboat, nothing is predictable, and on the first afternoon we saw a warning from Canal and River Trust (CRT) that the canal was closed ahead of us due to a fallen tree.

It was not just any fallen tree. The CRT team had visited it and decided their chainsaws and equipment were not hefty enough for the task. A specialist contractor would be required and that could take a while.

There is no point getting stressed living on a boat, so we moored up by a good pub and prepared to wait it out.

But then we saw a boat coming towards us from the direction of the stoppage and they explained that in fact the tree had fallen in such a way that there was room for a Narrowboat to pass underneath. It might not meet the CRT Health and Safety guidelines but it seemed fine to us, so we set off again and passed happily under the heavy tree before the pesky contractors arrived to close it down.

Life on a Narrowboat is full of adventures. They may not be world changing but each day has surprises and problems to solve. Sometimes it is a physically tiring life, being outside and moving heavy locks. But always it is a mentally tiring life, despite being the coolest most chilled thing we have ever done.

We are glad to be back.

Tag: CRT

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

A tree is down across the canal. What should we do?