Sunday August 5th, Atherstone - Hawkesbury Junction

How often is this the case? You start cruising and it’s cold, grey, overcast, drizzly and pretty horrible. In fact it feels more like April or October than early August. Three and a half hours later you tie up and then the sun decides to come out.

Why can’t we have a day that starts, remains and ends sunny and warm with no grey skies, downpours or drizzle and wondering how many layers you need to put on.

Even though the length from Atherstone to Nuneaton is one of my favourites, on a grey dank morning like today, even the views across the Anker valley to what are presumably the hills of Charnwood Forest seemed dull and uninspiring.

Mount Jud

South of Atherstone we enter former stone quarrying country. The signs are all around us in the form of old quarry railway bridges, old loading wharves, massive spoil heaps now given names like Mount Jud (after Judkin's Quarry) and bits of old quarry works – overhead conveyor belts and the remains of old pumps, pipes and water retaining bays. It’s all rather grubby.

Hartshill Maintenace Yard in better days

Hartshill Maintenance Yard is now deserted by Canal & River Trust/BW. “To Let” signs have appeared on some of the buildings, but with weeds growing apace, it all looks rather sad, tatty and unloved which is a crying shame on such an iconic group of buildings.

And then we come to Nuneaton. I usually try to be upbeat about the places we travel through (Rochdale excepted). I like to learn about the landscapes that helped form it, its history and the industrial archaeology you can witness at first hand on the canals.

Old canal warehouse at Boot Wharf, Nuneaton

But I have to try very hard to say anything positive about Nuneaton. The town centre is over a mile from the canal which makes it an unpopular stopping place for boaters who want supplies – Rugby & Atherstone are much better placed. You pass through an endless suburban landscape of housing estates with next to no industry (although there is a nice restored canal warehosue at Boot Wharf). It has a reputation (probably undeserved) for anti-social behaviour towards boaters.

And yet it possesses two wonderful attributes that you can feast your eye on, particularly at this time of year. I mean of course its back gardens and allotments.

The former are a constant source of interest. How over the top have the owners gone? Are they traditional, low maintenance or have the Ground Force team gone wild? It is also pleasing to note that over the last 10-15 years how few back gardens show the utter contempt some people had not just for their gardens, but also their canal frontage. Most back gardens today don’t fence the canal off, but make a real feature of their waterfront.

And as for the allotments! Nuneaton has a massive area of canalside allotments which, given the very few vacant plots we could see, are evidently very popular.

When we passed this way in early April, the plots were just being prepared after the winter hiatus. Lots of bare earth was in the process of being dug over. Now, they are in full production with every vegetable under the sun being grown. A large number of people were down on their own plots beavering away (or just comparing marrows over the proverbial and imaginary garden fence).

Lovely!

Once clear of yet more back gardens, Nuneaton and its satellite of Chilvers Coton reluctantly give way to a short outbreak of countryside before Bedworth appears. We have also moved from stone quarrying back to coal mining as Bedworth was very firmly a mining town. Fortunately, the canal bypasses the town with just a few council houses close to the canal before the scrap/junk heap that is Charity Wharf comes into view, just after the junction with the delightfully rural Ashby Canal.

I like boatyards. Most have a pleasant workaday atmosphere to them without much thought being given to tidiness or order. However, Charity Wharf (which advertises a dry dock it would probably take a month to get into after you had cleared the boats and junk out of the way) takes boatyard chic to an almost Olympic level. Huge piles of scrap and junk litter the place (and not just on land – some of the boats have clearly seen better days). What the neighbours think of it all (it is surrounded by housing) I shudder to think.

Once past the eyesore, school playing fields take over (a pleasant mooring spot, but probably not on a weekend in the school holidays) and then a long and deep cutting hide the canal from the main section of the town’s built up area.

Three former arms lead off between Nuneaton and Bedworth. The first – the Griff Arm – was a very narrow channel under a seemingly impossibly low bridge (unloaded boats had to remove their cratch to get under) that led to Griff Colliery. Some nearby ponds at Griff Hollows gave Georg Eliot the inspiration for “Mill on the Floss”.

The second – the Arbury Branch – led to Sir Roger Newdigate’s home, Arbury Hall. Here there was a network of canals in an almost domestic form, but with one branch that led to coal shafts on the estate.

The third, the Newdigate Arm, heralds the exit from Bedworth and the approach to Hawkesbury Junction. Like the Griff Arm, it was a colliery loading arm.

All three are now long gone, but the reed dominated entrances are still visible.

We are now moored on the long line of moorings that announce the iconic Hawkesbury Junction. We will leave the delights of its narrows, its 180° turn under the roving bridge and the 6” stop lock until tomorrow. For now, we’ll enjoy the sunshine.