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Sunrise on Sunday morning –
looking promising
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When I took Buddy out for
his morning constitutional on Saturday I combined it with getting rid of our
rubbish. There is a handy enclosure at
the bottom lock with rubbish bins for boaters’ use. Our rubbish was in a couple of used coal bags
and I carried them up to the lock, picking up any towpath litter that I saw on
the way. I wasn’t confident of carrying
both bags across the gates at once so left one on one side whilst I walked
across with the other. When I came back to
get the other the guy who lives in the lock cottage there was standing, in his
dressing gown, outside his front door.
He asked if I hadn’t noticed and I said, ‘noticed what’? He pointed out that the enclosure and bins
had been taken away by CRT.
Apparently, rubbish was
being left by non-boaters to such an extent that it was often piled up outside
the bins. Local businesses were even
dumping rubbish there, which I had rather suspected before when I’d seen the
amount and size of packaging material in the bins. The guy wasn’t happy as he now must take his
rubbish away in the car (the council can’t pick it up as there is no road access
to the cottage).
As our rubbish was rather
mounting it meant a car trip to the next boaters’ rubbish point at the top of
the Hatton flight. The facilities are
really poor in this area. The next
rubbish point is through Warwick and Leamington at Radford Semele. That point too, is probably in danger of
being removed as it is often overflowing with public waste – it seems people
can drive in their car to these places but not to the local tip – I suspect
they don’t want to queue up. Tips are
also becoming a problem for boaters as they are increasingly only allowing
locals in – you have to show proof of residence in the district.
Anyway, enough ranting 😊
The flight is now fully
open and we probably saw a dozen boats on the move over the weekend. Easter week really marks the start of the
summer boating season. It also means
that the winter relaxation of mooring restrictions will be lifted soon (31st March) e.g. in the
winter you can moor for 14 days nearly everywhere including sites marked for 24
or 48-hour moorings. That doesn’t bother
us as those sites get too busy in the summer, which is why the restrictions are
put on in the first place.
The second lock up the
flight was one of the ones being worked on over the last couple of months and
now has nice new bottom gates.
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Lock 27 with its new
bottom gates
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The side lock ladders had
also been replaced as the previous ones were, apparently, unsafe:
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The cill had been rebuilt
and some of the barge boards replaced too:
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Judith and Nigel came to
stay for the weekend and we spent Saturday afternoon in the Old Post Office and
Rigsby’s – two quirky real ale pubs in Warwick.
On Sunday we walked back
to Leamington Spa along the River Avon so they could catch a train home. It was a gorgeous day and we saw quite a few
butterflies, including at least a dozen male Brimstones, several Small
Tortoiseshells and a Comma.
I included pictures of a
Brimstone, when we saw our first of the year, in a recent blog entry so here
are a Small Tortoiseshell and a Comma that we photographed in previous years:
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Male Comma
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Underside of a Comma
showing the white comma mark
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An out of focus Small Tortoiseshell
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