Bartimaeus

I had heard the name Oswestry but never been there. In the street where we stopped, while Shane looked for a space to lock the tandem, I looked up at the assembled artworks.

The drinking statues were relaxed at the pub. Across the road it looked a bit more adversarial. Arch enemies, rather than friends were in conflict. The bowman seems to have upper hand but without context it is hard to know what is going on.

We climbed a single stair to get a look at the remains of Oswestry castle but there was very little left to see as it was lowered from it previous three stories to the level of just above the ground floor with much of the stones used in local buildings. Oswestry likes to have something interesting to see at first floor level it seems. There was some information about the past battles and I at last found out what a petard was. I had images of gibbets or masts, but it is a bomb designed to blow a hole in the wall, but lighting the fuse was touch and go, hoping you could get far enough away before you got blown up yourself. 

We found a seat in the shade to break for a drink and share a cake at the central Oswestry statue that I had seen on a post card recently. This looked a more peaceful life.

After a seat and refreshments I wanted to head towards a park. I was unsurprised it was a memorial park, with a large war memorial but, it had a few added extras when we looked around to the usual war memorial. The second world war list said it was to remember all the men and women who had died, rather than the men. In a quick scan of the sadly long list was all

e names. It didn't seem to be about civilian deaths. Shane at last noticed a Gwen. There were a couple of (?Welsh) names where I didn't know if they were normally male or female names, but Gwen was the only one of which we were confident.

At the side was another memorial, very specifically for railway men, which had been moved from the station when the station was closed. Like the Montgomery canal, the railway around here stopped being used, but parts of it are reopening for the purposes of heritage and leisure. 

There was an individual memorial to a local man who had earned the Victoria Cross and had amazingly survived the daring exploit that led to it being awarded. He continued in a military career after the war but at the age of 70 he died while cycling when he was hit by an army truck, of all things.

A further memorial was to the war poet Wilfred Owen. There was an interesting Edinburgh connection in that during the war he was wounded and was a patient in Craiglockhart hospital, where he met Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged him to write poetry. He returned to serve and wrote poetry and was sadly killed in the last week before the end of the war.

The park has proved an educational diversion, if not uplifting. We returned to the square. There were a lot of independent shops. Shane made use of a household goods shop. I bought some buckwheat and bulgar wheat. Looking up above the shop fronts, as well as inside the shops continued to be diverting.

With our missions accomplished, we headed back avoiding the busy roads and mainly using towpaths and roads where traffic can only go single file which guarantees they don't rush past as they know they may have to stop for a car at any moment. 

We had an entertaining conversation with the friendly couple in Popkiss, moored near us. We found they were booked to go through the locks on the same morning as us so we expected to be both travelling the next day and indeed we leapfrogged each other on the way. It was a scorching day and as there weren't any major splash risks, just four tame locks, I had the washing up in the bow well.

By the time we got to the end we saw that all the boats had their washing out just like us. Popkiss said this was their second lot of the day drying.  It felt much too hot for April and a very black cat was loving the heat.

Only as I was snapping the very black cat did I notice that a nearby boat had a cat on the roof. It was not using its basket but sunbathing on the roof. Their roof was a storage space and well covered with items, so perhaps that is why it wasn't finding a space on the hot metal, or it isn't as heat seeking as the black one.

I had seen two small dogs on the boat and a cat too seemed like a lively combination. Later I learned the black cats was theirs too. I heard the sound of an animal in distress. I looked out the window to see the black cat in the canal - I can't think what was up that caused it to go in at all. The lady from the boat had arrived and managed to scoop it out, thoroughly drookit. Neither the cat nor the lady looked happy! She went to get a towel to dry it up, while her two dogs sat obediently at the other side of the canal waiting for her to get back to them.