Jannock’s summer trip – Day #3

Monday 3rd September

Wildlife of the day – well …. wildlife  ….. and lots of it. Butterflies, Swifts, Dragonflies, Damselflies and best of all, Kingfishers, plural. We saw about 4 individual Kingfishers, one of which escorted us off of the Welford Arm, flying just ahead of us to see if we herded any tasty morsels in front ahead of us.

We started the day with a stroll into Welford. There is a very useful shop and Post Office in the village. If the Wharf Inn was not to your taste then don’t bother walking up to the Elizabethan as that’s unlikely to be either. Between the Wharf and the village is Welford’s ‘pocket park’. The Buddleia was teeming with butterflies, mostly Red Admirals of course.

Graham winded expertly in a confined space and we left Welford in beautiful sunshine and moved back down the arm in wonderful countryside. In Husbands Bosworth tunnel we met a Canaltime boat who was not as tight into the side as we’d have liked and so we stopped immediately after, at 13:00 , under the shade of overhanging trees so that we could sweep off the brickdust and repaint quite a length of the roof edge where a protruding section of tunnel roof had removed all of the paintwork. This is the second time that Jannock has required major touching up of paint after this tunnel and in the pub later, we found that this is not an uncommon procedure. The washing was put out onto the towpath so we spent lunchtime watching both the washing and paint dry.

Then onto the top lock at Foxton. Graham did yet more engineering techery whilst I went and took photos in the sun. Then I prepared a dinner of pork chop, potatoes and vegetable chilli.

Store cupboard challenge – Day #3. Stagg vegetable chilli (best before July 06) 6 years too late but who’s counting, but scoring an impressive 9/10. Graham would have awarded the extra point if it had contained some meat!

We visited Bridge 61, the alternate pub at the bottom of the flight and had an excellent evening chatting to the locals. We were even introduced to Tom, the celebrity retriever who has achieved almost 250k hits on YouTube as the Helter Skelter dog, as well as being a TV celebrity in the UK and the USA.

Brenda

www.jannock.org.uk