Saturday July 28th, Bridge 86 near Kent Green - Westport Lakes

We have now completed the Cheshire Ring. Instead of the usual week or so the hirers usually take, it has taken us 97 days since we passed Harding’s Wood Junction to start the descent of Heartbreak Hill. Mind you, we have had detours to Liverpool, Sowerby Bridge, Uppermill and Bugsworth along the way!

It is an interesting journey today, full of canal history.

First up was Heritage Marina where we left the boat for a weekend a few years ago for son in law Dave’s 40^th birthday bash. Then, after negotiating a succession of bridges we arrived at Scholar Green. This has poignant memories for me as the home of what was one of the most wonderful real ale pubs in the 1970’s – The Bird in Hand. Now long closed, it was a remarkable survival in a wave of keg beer nasties where the beer was brought up from the cellar in a jug. Priceless.

Scholar Green also had a swing bridge. At least it did, but the original structure has gone and boats can go straight through. A smaller bridge on wheels has replaced it, but is kept open until the locals need to use it when they pull a chain that passes under the boats to move it across.

Hall Green Stop Lock is next up. The Trent & Mersey Canal had an absolute phobia about other, newer canals joining it. It feared it would lose traffic and water to the newer upstart.

Hall Green Stop Lock & cottages

Here, at Hall Green, they raised it to the levels of paranoia by building a branch canal from their main line just north of Harecastle Tunnel that left on the “wrong side” and then doubled back over an aqueduct to join the Macclesfield Canal at Hall Green. The main line had dropped by two locks to give the necessary headroom for the aqueduct. Then, about a mile or so after leaving the main line, it joined the newer rival at Hall Green with not one, but two stop locks, one operated by each company complete with their own canal cottage for their lockkeeper.

Narrows at site of seond stop lock, Hall Green

Fortunately only one lock is in use today, the gates and paddles of the other long gone, although the narrows remain.

Tren & Mersey locks visible from Pool Hall Aqeuduct

Approaching Harding's Wood Junction

The “Macclesfield” then runs over a high embankment pierced by a main road and then by Pool Hall Aqueduct over the T&M before turning sharp left, past some nice permanent moorings, turning sharp left again and arriving at Harding’s Wood Junction. Here we turned sharp right (the turn being made more difficult by a C&RT mudboat moored on the widened area where boats make the turn) and headed for Harecastle Tunnel.

The water hereabouts is the colour of a rich tomato soup caused by iron oxide leaching out into the tunnel from the many old mines that riddle Harecastle Hill. Every now and then a campaign will spring up to clean up the old mines and eradicate the leaching, but an equally vociferous campaign will work hard to retain the “heritage” aspect of the coloured water. Fortunately, the latter have succeeded so far and the orange colour remains.

Harecastle Tunnel - northern portal

We had to wait for an hour or so at the tunnel for a single boat to come through. There was one boat already there – ‘Elysium’, with whom we have been playing hopscotch with ever since leaving Bugsworth. Another two boats arrived after us, so there was quite a convoy once we got started.

Harecastle Tunnel is rightly one of the canal experiences you remember above many others. Your first trip through becomes remembered as a boater’s rites of passage. You feel you have become a real boater after your first trip through. After a few passages, you become almost blasé about it, throwing hints and tips at first-timers as if you resemble the Ancient Mariner. And yet, once the tunnel keeper gives the all clear and lets you in, the adrenaline starts pumping and there is a frisson of anticipation as you nose the boat round the sharp curve into the narrow entrance and into the black hole.

Inexperienced tunnelers take up to an hour to get through – the usual is about 30-40 minutes. The roof is of uneven height and there are long periods where the steerer has to adopt an almost Quasimodo type stance to avoid losing the top half of his head (the area where his brains should be found).

Unique among canal tunnels, you can’t see the end when travelling through Harecastle from north to south. As there are no air vents at all in the tunnel, diesel fumes build up, so doors are swung across the south portal and powerful fans start up to draw out the fumes. The doors don’t swing open until you are almost at the end.

The boat in front of us, ourselves and the boat immediately behind us kept good time and were out in about 35 minutes. The boat at the back of the queue took much longer and must have been disconcerted when the tunnel keeper swung the doors shut again to allow the fans to continue working for a few more minutes.

Brindley's tunnel, southern end

We pulled in to the water point on the off side to refill our water tank. We had filled up last at Bugsworth before leaving and had passed on the water point at Bosley after we disliked the taste of what came out. There is a good view here of Brindley's original tunnel, completed in 1777 after 11 years work. To help speed traffic, Telford built the currently used tunnel in just 3 years, it opened in 1827 complete with a towpath (since removed).

Both tunnels were used enabling one way working, but subsidence from the mines inside the tunnel affected the original so badly it was closed in 1914. Today, the entrances at either end look like mouseholes.

Once the tank had been replenished, we were off again for the short distance to Westport Lakes where we became one of a pair of bookends – us right at the northern end of the mooring and another boat far away at the southern end.

Mooring at Westport Lakes