This was another day when the weatherman failed to warn us that there would be rain. Mostly it was drizzly sort of dampness rather than driving rain, but nevertheless we had certainly not ordered it! Where we had moored at Lower Heyford was about 8 hours boating from Oxford, so we decided that we would make two shorter boating days out of it, so that we could arrive in Oxford lunchtime on Friday or thereabouts rather than at 6.00pm when such moorings as there are might not be available. So that left us with a leisurely motor down the canal to a place called Thrupp where we were aware that there were moorings, somewhere to fill the boat up with water and a tea room which sold cakes!
When we got out of the cutting that we had been moored in we passed very close to Lower Heyford Station. It's extremely weird to hear the platform announcement through the gap in the hedge as you are passing on the canal. What was immediately clear was that the livestock had changed. We could now see cows in every direction, and not a sheep to be seen or heard. I wonder if this was historically as these farms would be very close to Oxford to supply milk, or did the adjacent railway take the milk to London perhaps! Anyway this field was full of mothers and babies, many of whom were making a lot of noise.
They even had an unusual 6 legged cow in this field!
There were 5 locks for us to navigate today, and just like yesterday, they were well-spaced out so we took it in turns to do them - very equitable.
For quite a lot of the route we were travelling along next to the Cherwell. You can see it in this picture only a few metres away and probably a couple of metres below us. The next lock dropped the canal down to the level of the river, and for about a mile the canal and the river flow in the same bed. It means that the canal has a significant flow for this mile, which is quite sinuous and so you have to have the engine going at quite a rate in order for you to have steerage and some control. It feels a bit like running the rapids, but fortunately without the stones in the way. At the end of the mile another lock separates the river which goes off to the left and the canal continues through a lock without very much drop on its rather quieter way. There is a traffic light system which alerts the canal boater to the state of the river. At the top lock this was not working, where we would have needed it to alert us of the conditions ahead, but at the bottom one it was (after the river section was over!)
This is what the traffic light looks like, and you can see that it is set for 'Proceed with Caution Falling Water Levels'. In full spate, I would imagine it could be very exciting, and I was very happy not to try!
We then had less than a mile to go to get to our planned mooring stop, but interesting things have happened to places we passed in that mile. We passed a railway bridge near a village called Shipton on Cherwell where on the 24th December 1874 8 carriages of a train travelling over the canal bridge fell
into the frozen canal below killing 34 people. It looks a very calm and rural place now. You can't tell just by being there can you! And in a quarry just after that, the thigh bones of a Cetiosaurus oxoniensis were found, which apparently can now be found in the Oxford Museum! I'll let you know if we find it!
Anyway tomorrow we plan to get into Oxford and moor up on the canal. We haven't done that before; we were moored on the river last year, so that will be interesting to find out if there is indeed mooring space.
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