Most younger people with
dogs, that we meet during day, are dog walkers which is quite a pleasant job if
you live in the country. Mind you, you
have to like dogs to do the job; I don’t think I would enjoy it as I am not
really interested in most other dogs.
One dog walker, who walks three spaniels from three homes and has stopped to
chat with Buddy a few times at Hatton, reminded me of a dog walker at Bidford on
Avon. She used to have eight large dogs
with her first thing then two hours later come back with six little dogs and
then she repeated the whole thing in the afternoon!
After a walk and lunch, I
prepared a Kashmiri butter chicken curry for the slow cooker. The idea being that we would do some locking
in the evening, when Karen returned home from work, and we would have a meal ready
for us when stopped for the night.
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Setting off for our
evening cruise
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Buddy and I set out at
4.30 to fill up with water and then start going down the Hatton flight with the
intention that Karen would join us when she got home from work - she had
promised to leave early.
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Looking down the first few
locks – the café on the right had closed for the night
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A boat had gone down about
an hour before we set off so every lock was set against me but it was a lovely
evening and as it was quiet I could leave Buddy off the lead whilst walking
between them.
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Our first daisies of the
year – Karen said she was tempted to pick a few if we hadn't had fresh
flowers on the boat already
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Karen joined us at about
6.30 after we had been down the first five locks. She had parked at the Hatton Arms pub and
walked across the field to get to us. We
soon adjusted the routine from single handing to paired locking, which meant Karen
did most of the walking 😊.
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Looking down some of the
locks with Warwick church tower in the background
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We carried on for another
nine locks and decided to stop for the night in a pretty pound between the
locks numbered 33 and 32. It was just
next to a bridge called Ugly bridge and the lane that runs over it is called
Ugly Bridge road. It turned out to be a
really quiet mooring and so much better than mooring up in Warwick where there
are lots of tall trees making it feel rather gloomy.
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Our mooring for Thursday
night
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The curry went down really
well and we were pleased with our new chillies.
We have only just started harvesting them from an early chilli plant and
it always takes a while to judge how many are needed to get the heat required
for a particular dish. Our recipes are
annotated with descriptions of our chilli plants and the number of pods
required.
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View from our bedroom on
Thursday night
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When Buddy and I took the
train to Warwick on Wednesday it made me do some research on Hatton
station. It is an unmanned station and
not large enough for a ticket machine.
You have to put any amount of cash in a machine to purchase a permit to
travel and then make up the difference at the destination or with a conductor
on the train.
It was built in 1852 and
was on one of the lines that had dual gauges. In its heyday, in the 1940s it
was at its busiest. I found it amazing
that there were eight staff working each day (station master, two ticket clerks
and five porters). In addition, there were signalmen for the three signal boxes
(it is at a junction) and a gas lamp lighter.
There were 67 passenger trains a day and seven freight trains would stop
to load/unload. Increasing car ownership
caused the decline in passenger numbers of course, and freight trains stopped
in the 1960s due to increased usage of road freight.
I will go down a few more
locks tomorrow and moor in one of the lower pounds. We fancy going for a Friday night out in
Warwick and it’s only about a mile to the town centre.
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