 |
Our mooring at Napton
|
After our ‘gruelling’ two
mile cruise to Napton on Friday we thought we should take it easy on Saturday
and stay put. We had a wander into the
village to get our Saturday paper and a few other things at the post
office. It was still mild so we sat
outside and had coffee and hot chocolate.
 |
Waiting for ourdrinks and my mid-morning pain au chocolate
|
Napton ticks a lot of our ‘resting
place’ boxes, e.g. there is no commuter rat run through it but it is a bit too
large for our liking.
After lunch we went for a
walk up the Napton flight of locks. It
was so still and even the pounds between the locks were still – no sign of
water flowing between the locks. The
locks have recently been closed for a couple of months for winter maintenance
so that probably accounts for a low flow as the gates will be more watertight.
 |
A sort of upside down
photo – unusual near locks
|
An exciting time for us –
we found a stanking plank store with colour coded planks! We assume they are used when repairing the
locks on the Napton flight – the colours indicating which locks they belong to.
 |
Colour coded stanking
planks
|
One thing we remember from
when we were last here in 2013 was collapsed electricity pylons in the fields
near the top lock. I can’t find any
reference to them on the internet but it seems very unusual to just leave them
lying there. Originally I thought they
were wind driven water pumps but I’m pretty sure they’re pylons.
 |
Collapsed pylon near the
top lock
|
We spent the rest of Saturday at home on the boat.
PS: A reader got in touch to add
some information about the old brickworks wharf at Napton that was mentioned in
Friday’s blog entry. Sometime after the
brickworks closed, a chap called Peter Nichols ran a boat building business
from the wharf. He did this until c2000
and then moved the business to Braunston.
His narrow boats and Dutch barges are well respected amongst the steel
boat building industry. (Thanks to Ditchcrawler)
No comments:
Post a Comment