No roundabouts, but round about Milton Keynes

 We woke up to a completely blue sky this morning - cold and clear. 

It did all look very fresh and autumnal.  We almost immediately drove past the fields that we saw last night on our way to the closed pub.  The flooding still looked pretty extreme, and whilst the water had gone down where we had moored, it was still high in the field next to the pub.  Not much chance of walking your dog and annoying the cows in that field at the moment. (That's what the notice on the gate warns you not to do!)

The canal very much followed the route of the river, and so the canal too meandered around a lot - lots of bends, some of them with bridges on them, and some of them with bridges and boats coming the other way! Our first three locks were at Soulbury less than an hour after we had started.  Three locks are extremely close together and you need to manage the water so that you don't flood the pub - the white building by he third lock.

We had the benefit of volunteers to help us which was very nice.  We also had Matt's wife and daughter with us too so Matt didn't have to get off the boat to do the locks.  The view below is from the second of the three locks, and the buildings on the left must have been used for business in time gone by.  I expect the pub below was always a pub!

After this the canal winds around a bit and then comes to the outskirts of Milton Keynes which of course were built long after the canal. After about 40 minutes you come to Fenny Compton where there is a rather attractive lock with a swing bridge for pedestrians over it.  That has to be moved out of the way before a boat can enter the lock.  This would have been in the middle of countryside until the mid 70s.  The red-brick building on the left of the picture is the pump house which used to pump water back up the canal.  

This marks the beginning of 14 miles without any locks, and the canal winds about the countryside, or did until Milton Keynes was built so it's quite interesting to see the way in which the landscapers have utilised the existence of the canal to add a feature to a community.  There are many parks on either side of the canal and where houses come quite close to the canal there are often additional green spaces.  This is a very typical view with a level of wildness and a level of planned and partly manicured parkland too.  The footbridge in the shot is typical of the access provided from the residential area to the parkland. 

14 miles without a lock is quite a lot of travelling - more than four hours.  We took it in turns to do this.  Chris was driving at the end of the route as we came to Cosgrove which was our final planned destination (well, the Barley Mow to be more precise!)  Before you get to the lock that marks the end of this stretch of the Grand Union and is a lock where you start rising to higher water again, and the bit that goes up to Gayton, there is a fairly long aqueduct called the Great Ouse Aqueduct which of course crosses that river.  It was an extraordinary sight today.  We have been reading about the terrible flooding in Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire and today we could see where it was coming from.

This was the view looking towards the west.  The river should be in between the trees in the centre of the picture.  It's flow was amazing - really fast. The view the other way was rather similar, again the river should have been in between the trees shaping off to the left.

I took another picture of the scene to the west because of the fantastic light on the water covering the fields. Look at the trees in the distance.  

We very successfully moored in Cosgrove with the pub visible just across the canal.  The access to that was very unusual - it was a horse tunnel.  The next bridge which is the one that would have been used to take the horses over where the towpath changed sides was not built until after the canal was opened, and so this tunnel was made.  It was extraordinary to walk through, and a local pointed out a date of 09/24 that had been written to show how high the water might have been in the tunnel this month.  The local thought it was a prediction rather than a reality, but even so!

We had dinner at the pub with Matt and his wife Olga and their daughter called Ina. We had a lovely conversation about all sorts of issues - very good company they are.  So a very enjoyable day and 17 miles travelled and 6 locks achieved!! 

Tomorrow we have 5 miles to go to our first lock and then 7 locks up into Stoke Bruerne, then the Blisworth Tunnel and home to Gayton.