Bidford on Avon (last day here and it didn’t stop raining all day)

This is what it looked like all day on Wednesday.  In fact, this was a short period when it was hardly raining at all.

View out of the boat all day

In the morning, Buddy and I carried on walking down the Avon Valley Way towards Evesham which is downstream from where we are moored.  It was so wet that we only saw one other walker out.  After a mile we reached the next lock, IWA Lock.  IWA stands for Inland Waterways Association and their donation helped build the lock.  The lock itself was built in 1969 by members of the Royal Engineers and volunteers from Gloucester Goal.

Plaque commemorating the IWA and those who built the lock

Standing at the tail of the lock you can get a good picture of why there are weirs and locks on rivers.  Weirs are built to keep water levels artificially high in the river behind the weir.  These artificially higher levels make the river navigable.  The locks are built to enable river craft to get past the weir; the lock enables boats to go either up or down.  A lock cut is built around the weir for boats to get to and from the lock and can be seen in the picture below.

On some rivers, lock cuts can be very short, like here on the Avon or a mile or so, especially when they are also forming a short cut across a large u-bend in a river.

The weir is on the left.  The top lock cut is behind the lock gates.  There is a boom across the top of the weir which should stop any stray boats that get into difficulty trying to turn off the river into the lock cut.

It’s now 33 days since we came onto the River Avon at Stratford and we have only come eight miles downstream in that time; maybe we’re heading for a record for the longest time to get down to the River Severn 😉.  Although we did have an excursion back up the Stratford canal for a couple of days one weekend to go to the Beltane Bash (or hippyfest as we called it) at Preston Bagot.  In case you didn’t know, Beltane is a Gaelic celebration of May Day and has links to fire and fertility. 

I’ll be having a cruise on Thursday as we will have been at Bidford for our allowance of 48 hours.  It’s a bit obvious if you start to hog a mooring in a town so it’s only fair we move on anyway, especially as space is very limited here.

I headlined this blog entry by saying it rained all day.  I have to admt that that was based on the local weather forecast which predicted it would rain until midnight.  Richard, a friend who also lives in a boat named after a butterfly (Brimstone), asked on FaceBook, 'When will it stop raining?'.  I looked out of the window at just before 7 and it had actually stopped 😊

View from the boat in the evening and...

...this was at 6 on Thursday morning when Karen left for work