Bye bye River Weaver

Thursday 16th May 2019

After a peaceful night on Barnton Cut visitor moorings we wer up and showered ready for an early morning stroll back to Saltisford lock to see the engineering complex that is the repair job.

On the walk back to Jannock we picked up a carrier bag full of litter, mostly from three oiks who had cycled to the towpath in order to drink and smoke last evening (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) all while playing “their” music – loud enough to send pulses into space for passing lifeforms to hear – decode – and then decide to invade a different solar system. Luckily they’d had to be home by bedtime – the oiks not the aliens.

We motored back to Northwich to fill with water and empty the rubbish (including all the litterpickings over the last couple of days) and then returned to the bottom of the Anderton lift ready for our 13:40 passage back up onto the Trent and Mersey again.

The lift had broken again needing bespoke victorian style welding and so only one caisson was operational and so we finally ascended at 16:00 – just two ascents behind Tyseley. Never mind, the sun was out and all the crews waiting on the lift moorings were chatting quite happile – and toilets didn’t get mentioned once.

Out of the lift at 16:45 and turn left. We managed a cuppa before we got to Barnton tunnel and then onto Saltisford tunnel where the waiting continued for another 30 minutes before we could pass through. We finally moored for the night immediately after Taylors bridge (207) which overlooks Acton bridge and the bits of the River Weaver we could not access.

After supper we walked, through corn fields a’la Teressa May – not, there were paths. We went down to the huge Acton swing bridge and found ‘the Danny’ – the Daniel Adamson, a steam boat of note, recently rescued from the breakers and restored, moored below the bridge. Further up-stream we found two old apparently dis-used MoD sites on the River bank, who knows what for or when.  Google told us that they were Project Pluto water pumping stations designed to enable rapid extraction of petroleum products stored during the cold war in underground old salt caves but they are not used now and currently up for sale if you want them.

Brenda