Bartimaeus

The warm and bright weather gave us no excuse not to finish the painting yesterday.  Clare did the dark blue and I did the light grey, with a quick turn in the winding hole to give access to the other side..  I was pleased to discover that the tunnel band - the contrasting stripe at the stern of the boat - was not white as I had thought for all these years.  It is also the same light grey used elsewhere.

In the afternoon we cycled in to Oswestry in search of various essentials including more paint brushes.  We were too late to see the castle by several centuries, it was "slighted" in the aftermath of the Civil War.  We did find a statue of Wilfred Owens in the park, depicted sprinkling poetry.

By the time we got back to the boat, the paint had dried, and it was a pleasant temperature for me to finish off the light blue paintwork.

So this morning, with another hot day in prospect we were able to set off in the morning.  Having discovered the stiles on the towpath, I had found a quiet road route to Pant. Whatever the name means in Welsh, the hill up to the main road certainly made us both pant.

We dropped down to the canal again beyond and followed quiet roads to the next village, Llanymynech, where the canal restarts. We went to see if there was anything happening at the canal wharf cafe, but like so much around here it was a weekend only affair.  There was a narrowboat moored at the wharf.  A round trip on the boat has to cross the border into Wales to get to the winding hole on the other side of the bridge.

We had an early lunch at the cafe in the village.  The service was very friendly, as we have now come to expect.  Afterwards we rejoined the canal and headed further in to Wales.

I had believed that the canal was navigable from here, but soon discovered this was not so.  An old stone bridge was by-passed by a minor road at towpath height, cutting the canal.  The water continued on both sides however.  A little further along we came to a pair of locks that look like they may be fully functional.

The upper lock of the pair was full while the lower was empty.  The paddles on the tail gates were extremely standard looking gate paddles. I was intrigued by the winding gear for the head gate. The usual windlass spindle turns a small cog which causes the large wheel to turn.  This in turn will move the (white painted) quadrant below.  Presumably this is connected under the water to a cover over the sluice channel.  It was all chained shut, so even if we'd had a windlass, we couldn't have meddled.

We decided it was safe enough to ignore the sign banning cycling since the company no longer exists.  Times have changed.

We carried on further and found several more breaks in the canal.  A fast and busy 'A' road cut the canal in two places less than a mile apart.  In each case a widened and straightened road had been engineered a couple of feet above the water level in the adjacent canal.  This architectural vandalism will be expensive to reverse.

On the section of towpath between the breaks I saw what I thought was a slow-worm on the towpath.  By the time we had reached it it had slithered in to the undergrowth.  We turned back shortly after, there was no significant canal feature before Welshpool, and neither of us thought we were up to the total mileage there and back.

We'd seen a strange contraption in the canal on the way out and wondered what it was.  On our return, we discovered that it is a perch for a mallard duck - according to at least one mallard duck.

We stopped at the shop at Pant on the way back and stocked up further including an ice cream each.

Before dinner (on the back deck), we drove down to the winding hole again, this time reversing back towards the bridge for a photograph.  We continue to collect evidence for the Silver Propellor Challenge. We didn't think we'd managed any last year, but realised later that we had visited three.  There are two locations on the Montgomery Canal.  The other is at the southern end.  Even if we fancied cycling that far, we don't have anything to allow us to take to the water when we arrive.  We'll have to settle for one.