So, to get started here is a piece about a walk along the canal that runs through Maesbury and is one reason why it is the place it is. If you know nothing about canals don't worry - there will be lots more on them and how they shaped Maesbury later...
A WALK ALONG MAESBURY'S CANAL
We start at ASTON LOCKS
OK I do go on about canals and our bit of what is now called the Montgomery canal in particular. But there is good reason for this. Our Maesbury bit of canal is magic! I should say at this point that I know quite a lot of bits of canal - over two thousand miles of the stuff - and can tell you our bit is right up in my top ten!
Most of the bit I will describe is in Maesbury Parish but to begin this walk along our bit I will introduce you to Aston locks, which are just over the border from our Parish. It was at Aston that they held the recent opening ceremony (2003) for our bit and it was fitting that the event was held here for these locks are an ideal scene-setter for this walk.
The three locks, spread over a half mile were ready to be opened in 1997 - and then chained up to stop boats using them for a year on orders from the, then and in 2003, local BW general manager. This action nearly resulted in the battle of Aston - which I have told you about in a previous article in the Parish Magazine between WRG and BW. At the 2003 (re)-opening of the locks there was at least one snide remark about this happening from the general manager (though I had to watch a video of the speeches to pick it up). Given the size of the Waterway Recovery Group (WRG) gent and the enduring resentment that group must feel after the chaining, the 'lady' who made it was lucky not to land in the lock! Such a happening would have given many of those trodden under her heel great pleasure!
Aston top lock is beside a nature reserve, from which the sound of bird song is often quite loud. It was the WRG (volunteer) canal restorers who built the nature reserve - just as they did all the work on restoring the locks. The organisation they are affiliated to - the Inland Waterways Association - paid a good bit towards the cost of the lock restoration and me and you (in the shape of Oswestry Borough Council) paid most of the rest. One group however paid nowt and they were the ecos who demanded the nature reserve be built before the canal to Maesbury could be opened!
As has been said the reserve was built as part of a deal to get the locks open - a deal which the eco-groups later reneged on - resulting in the locks being padlocked - and our bit not being opened to boats for not one but over 5 years!
Still all that is now in the past, the nature reserve has matured and now anyone allowed to visit it has the added bonus of seeing boats going down the locks - making this a place to enjoy. To do this you can park opposite the Queens Head pub - in the free canal car park, then walk down the 300 yards to the top lock. Once there you can sit on one of the seats (provided for your comfort by the local canal society) and enjoy the ambience of the place.
Having sat for a bit you might like to have a look at the locks...
Aston locks are as near bog standard as locks get - one top gate, two bottom gates, two top ground paddles, two bottom gate paddles. How and what this lot does I will leave you to figure out. (I have heard learned men tell their wives the most amazing tales about what happens to get a boat from up here to down there!) For the record these are narrow locks, designed to take a seventy foot, forty ton boat. And I did say boat and not barge!! Our canal does not have barges on it. A barge is at least ten feet wide and the locks on our canal are designed to (just) take a seven foot wide narrow boat!
Though all the boats on this canal were built narrow to conserve water, moving a boat down the six foot drop of each Aston lock still uses quite a bit of water - about twenty-five thousand gallons per lock working. To give you an idea of how much that amount of water is - it's about half the amount of water that a normal 2+2 family uses in the home each year. And such an amount of water weighs quite a bit too - over a hundred tons - yet the Aston locks, which move such masses are light enough to be worked by young children who should, of course, be supervised and wearing life-jackets - lest they fall in and bang their heads. And with that thought it's time to move on...
TO MAESBURY
Heading south from the locks towards Maesbury, after the first bend we are really into the country and with no roads near the canal the peace is complete. People come a long way to walk in such places as these but we have it right near home. What a nice place we live in! And so we wander on through a green leafy world where, if the canal owners, British Waterways, just deign to keep the grass cut, we could enjoy all the local wild flowers.
Mentioning the wild flowers, the towpath along here was and in parts still is a good (but stoney) walking surface but BW are on a mission to improve it to allow wheelchair access (which is good). Unfortunately BW's stated intentions might be good but their method is anything but! This involves destroying the wild flowers that grow in their millions along here, replacing them with a narrow dust-topped path flanked by newly grassed edges. This is totally at odds with BW's boast that the canal is unspoilt but matches perfectly with BW's urban ideas of the countryside and how it should be treated.
Luckily BW only own the canal so the countryside around it is unspoiled and from the towpath walking towards Maesbury one can look out over plenty of England's green and pleasant lands. As you walk along here it's fun to figure out (if you live locally) where you are and who lives where in the houses and farms you see. As you do this you may also note a stream passing under the canal that marks the boundary of Maesbury parish.
A short distance after the parish boundary comes a bridge over the canal and, just before that, a widened bit of canal on the offside. This wide bit was Maesbury's winding hole (with wind pronounced as in "the wind blows") - a place where full length (70 foot) canal boats could be turned round. Normally canals are too narrow for boats to wind as they wish, so if there was a need for boats to turn then winding holes were provided. The wide place we see near the bridge was once such a place and it allowed boats bringing goods from Wales to Maesbury Marsh to turn and go back for more.
As such turning places are few and far between and this being the only one between the locks and Maesbury you may wonder why it has been half blocked off in the restoration by BW - rather than being dredged of mud for boats to use (as has the one at Gronwen which we will get to later). Maybe the reason has something to do with the recent restoration of our Maesbury length being Ecology led - which seems to mean, while BW destroys the towpath wild flowers to plant garden grass, on the canal, which was built for boats, those boats are only tolerated but not made welcome and so work to improve the canal for boats is kept to a minimum by the powers that be.
The main reason for this dislike of boats on this canal (it is alleged) being that BW have sold all the water they would have used on our canal as drinking water for Crewe. To get the water to Crewe it travels down the Llangollen canal not the Monty (for, as BW have refused to allow any water on the Monty to be pumped back up lock flights, water passed to the Monty from the Llangollen is lost as a revenue source). By selling the water BW make money - so much money that the water sales contracts are signed guaranteeing that the water is supplied and this water supply function takes priority over any boating considerations - especially on the Monty which BW considers as a country canal with very low priorities.
By rationing water on the Montgomery canal BW only harm the local economy (which they don't care about) and boaters, on which they make a loss (making them not the BW bean counters great love). Meanwhile by excluding boats BW can pay lip service to the anti-boat eco-lobby and use them as a reason for keeping down boat numbers, (when the real reason is their sale of what was originally the water earmarked for the restored Monty.)
Having said BW have embraced the idea of eco-led restoration, one should point out that compared to the old type sane normal restorations (at a few hundred thousand per mile) it is a very costly thing. For example it cost some œ2.1 million to restore a mile of Monty to eco standard (That is to actually change a canal from one used by boats to an eco-canal which was less boat-friendly.) Such a sum, you may think should have paid for the eco-dreams with money to spare but I note that future Monty eco-restoration has been costed at œ5 million a mile!)
Pondering on the monetary cost of ecology - a real mad hatter's tea-party of a subject - you may miss the next point of interest on our wander. This is just round the next bend. It's our famous Maesbury mile marker. On the subject of this mile marker we are back to the dark world of BW management politics where, behind closed doors, they make their plans and we (the public) are often called the enemy.
This seems to be the case with this mile marker for, though the locks at Aston were finished in 1997 and the canal below was used by Barry Tuffin's boats, when the man who paid (£800) for the marker asked as a favour to bring it to this site by boat, BW's lady manager (her again) said no not on my watch mate! BW refused due to the boat having an engine, then refused to let it be pulled by a horse, then refused to even talk to the man apart from saying no!
Having been thus treated by BW the man (who pays BW £500 per year for his boat license) felt rather unhappy with this result (as did a whole host of us fellow payers and canal users.) His unhappiness was little decreased by BW's offer to store the marker (at a price?) until they decreed it was OK for them to put it in place when they felt the urge. So, having spent 3 weeks bringing the marker to Queens Head and more time waiting for BW to say yes, the man took it away on his boat and travelled round the canal system with it on display - even going under Tower Bridge and through a long canal tunnel under the Pennines (twice) - as a sign of what a lot of ****s the managers of our canals are and how they really think they can treat of boaters and the general public.
Finally, 5 years after they chained up the locks that WRG restored - and which the BW manager had said would be chained for a year - the same manager had her day of glory in participating in the unchaining and opening of the canal locks at Aston and only then did she allow the mile marker to be carried down by the man's private boat and put in place!
So finally, having been carried round Britain as a symbol of the bloody-mindlessness of those in power - and now with a couple of thousand miles on it, the marker arrived where you can see it planted in the earth. Mind you even that planting turned out not to be straight forward as the BW manager and her red tape crew demanded all manner of safety assessments be made and forms filled in before the hole a yard deep, wide and long could be dug. It is rumoured that, in keeping with BWs attitude and this safety lunacy, the men who dug the hole had to wear hard hats but finally (as you can see) the marker is in place!
Just round the bend from the marker the sight of the tall bone mill chimney heralds our approach to the village of Maesbury Marsh. A few houses were here 200 years ago when the canal was dug. In those days at this point the Oswestry - Shrewsbury turnpike road crossed the proposed line of the canal so a new bridge had to be built to carry the road over the canal. And as the Turnpike provided the best route into Oswestry and the surrounding area it was at Maesbury Marsh that the canal company also built the infrastructure to move cargo between the boats on the canal and the carts on the land. To do this they created wharfs and warehouses, cart-storage and stabling, plus housing for many of the canal companies employees who would be staffing the site. And from this nucleus around the wharf the village of Maesbury Marsh quickly developed and expanded to nearly its current size in just a few years.
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It was across the wharfs at Maesbury Marsh, which by 1835 in the golden age of canals was an inland port supplying a large area of the Marches and Wales, that cargos were brought from all over the world. And, once landed from the boats, from the wharfs the goods went out in carts and waggons for local distribution.
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To us in the twenty-first century looking at Maesbury Marsh it hardly seems credible that this tiny place with the barely recognisable (but still in place) wharfs was once every bit as important as container deports are today. And, just as the wharfs are still here, so are many of the canal buildings - including the Wharfingers house (which overlooks the main wharfage area) and the Navigation.
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Nowadays, in keeping with its name you may notice that the pub sports a sign with a canal scene, though it's not one based on our canal. In fact the pub canal scene can still be seen today - at Lapworth in Warwickshire - but the last time I passed there the house beside the lock had a Porsche parked outside!ON TO GRONWEN
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Heading south from Maesbury Marsh the canal has some interesting twists and around one bend you may notice some large black posts set back in the towpath by the hedge. These posts, called Totem Poles, mark overnight mooring sites for the visiting boats and along the edge of the canal there are mooring rings provided for the visiting boats to tie up to. Needless to say, the famous £2.1 million spent on this section of restored canal did not include paying for these mooring facilities. They, like others just above Maesbury bridge and various waterside seats, including those at Aston, were paid for and installed by the local canal society with not a sous from BW or their eco grant..jpg)
The last mooring ring is just before an almost unnoticeable aqueduct over the Morda Brook (or River) which, having passed under the canal, goes on its way to a ford on the nearby lane. That lane will curve and cross the canal a little way on but first, between the towpath and the canal comes one of the features (paid for out of the £2.1 million) which were put in to encourage nature in the brown. As you may notice, this expensive feature consists of two rows of metal piles with mud between - making an effective narrowing of the canal on a corner to annoy boaters if nothing else!
Round the bend much more money has been spent on another nature bit - the much deepened pool with heavy wooden edging along the canal to stop those naughty boats from going in there and damaging the newly planted ecology. There used to be a hundred year old reed bed here I understand, but not being the right sort of eco-reeds for our area, or so I was told, they were dredged out - to be replaced with - reeds. See if you can spot the new ones in the black lagoon!
The offside wood edging along the ex-reed bed leads right up to Crofts Mill lift bridge. It has been pointed out that this wood seems to have been carefully shaped to make the bridge entry for boats difficult while the bridge is the most difficult one to operate on the whole canal system! Incidentally all bridges along the canal have names though how they got the names is often a mystery. Bridges through Maesbury parish are called Red, Park Mill, Maesbury Marsh, Spiggotts and Croft's Mill.
Crofts Mill lift bridge is brand new. But the reason for the name is lost in the history of the canal. Who was Mr Croft? And where was his mill, given that the mill we call Peate's came along a few years after the original bridge was built over the canal here? Like Mr Croft the original bridge that bore his name has long since gone but we do have a new bridge....
And what a bridge it is for by the standards of this and other narrow canals the bridge is massive. It is also massively over-engineered one understands - with the piles that support it going down a huge distance into the clay sub-soil. This has produced, on a very minor road with a ford just round the corner, a bridge fit for Euro-juggernauts! With this in mind, it may be that in the future someone has planned for the little lane over the bridge and through the ford to be expanded into a Euro-Highway!
Just beyond the bridge is the canal arm leading to Peate's Mill. It is rumoured that the canal authorities would really like to block this off as the water flowing out of it comes from the Morda Brook, which in turn gets input from Oswestry sewage works. The resulting waters are not approved of by the ecological lobby, even though that very water has fed the canal for 200 years and no doubt helps fertilize the weed growth the ecos treasure...
From the arm it's a short run round the corner to Gronwen - where the Morda tramway used to reach the canal and where our newly opened bit ends with a winding hole for visiting boats to turn round and retrace their steps. Meanwhile the towpath does go on - all the way to Newtown - but our wander ends here for, just before reaching Gronwen, we have left Maesbury Parish.
Just as our entry into Maesbury was marked by a water course so is our exit. For yet another little stream flows under the canal twixt Peate's arm and Gronwen. For the record this brook was used quite recently for a full immersion Baptism - a thing the ecos might not approve of given that it adds to the pollution already in the stream from the Morda Brook via Oswestry sewage and Peate's mill. For those who may be worried that the baptised one might suffer ill effects from the immersion he has since got a motorbike and a girlfriend.
Back on the walk at this point the stream is joined by another brook which flows down past Sweeney Hall from Morda. And at this stream the boundry of Maesbury Parish comes and our walk ends.
-- The End --
