I hope it’s not a sign of
getting older but my cold is really hanging around. Neither of us has caught a cold since living
on the boat so I put it down to our family break over Christmas. It keeps moving from throat to ears to chest and
back again, but that’s enough of my ailments; however, it does mean not much
has happened over the last couple of days.
Karen has got back into
the swing of going to work and I’m back to being a boat husband. Buddy and I have been out for walks as usual
but nothing too strenuous. As we are
still moored below Napton hill I went to explore around the old clay pits and
the brickworks.
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Extremely clayey underfoot
– hence a good location for the old brickworks
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During the 19th
and into the 20th century large parts of Napton hill were dug away
to get the clay for making bricks and tiles.
The brickworks were built at the bottom of the hill by the South Oxford
canal. Coal for the kilns was brought in by boat and the bricks and tiles taken
by boat all over the country.
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Looking down onto old clay
pits - the brickworks stretched across the middle ground
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We headed further up the
hill and found the line of the tramway that used to bring trucks of clay down
from the clay pits higher up the hill
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Photo I found from the
1950s. Copyright: Windows on Warwickshire
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The position of these boulders on the
hillside does not look natural to me but I have been unable to find any reference
to them of the web.
On our way back down the
hill we passed the pig field that all three of us stopped by on one of our
walks at the weekend. As soon as the
pigs saw Buddy coming they squealed with delight and came charging over to the
fence. Buddy was just as excited so I
let them all have a good sniff before getting back to the warmth of the boat.
Well, the ice has all gone
this morning, so I think I’ll take a short cruise to fill up with water. As nice and quiet as it is here, the towpath
is really muddy and clayey so not much fun for Karen in the dark especially as
we are moored quite a way from the car.
So that’s another reason to move and find a drier spot.
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