We didn’t linger in Lechlade, it was cold and despite it being a pretty little place we decided to save our explorations for another time. We meandered back along the twists and turns of the river enjoying the countryside until we found a bank to moor against where I could get of the boat with my dignity intact and Eric could climb onto the roof to do some more solar panel wiring.
Everyone is happy
Although I thought we were in the middle of nowhere, it turns out to have been a favourite place of the Victorian textile designer William Morris. He rented the 16th century manor house at Kelmscott to help him escape the paparazzi of his day.
Kelmscott Manor
I wonder what he would have made of the likes of me wandering around his garden, marvelling in the beauty of the place
I would have loved to go inside the manor, as it has been conserved and is open to the public but only on certain days.
However as the gates were open and it isn’t anyone’s home I had a sneaky walk around outside.
One of Morris’ ideals and concerns was the damage done by architectural restoration. No wonder he loved this village, I felt like I had stepped back in time a few centuries.
I think it would be quite an enjoyable challenge to walk the entire Thames Path
By mid morning our batteries were fully charged, (we don’t charge overnight) After a chat with Matt the lockie, to pay our dues, we were escorted by a swan towards Lechlade. It wouldn’t be a long trip, we could see the spire of St Lawrence church under a mile away.
Leaving St John’s for the final leg into Lechlade
Although we were a bit worried as we approached Lechlade, the swans were getting dangerously large.
Beware, of the wildlife in Lechlade
Lechlade is known to boaters for its offside mooring, which is shared by a herd of cattle. Now don’t get me wrong, I love a steak dinner, but I don’t particularly fancy becoming the steak’s dinner. And there’s many tales of the cows chewing ropes and licking paintwork and occasionally even stepping onto the deck. This herd isn’t aggressive, just inquisitive, but the canny boaters come armed with an electric fence to give a bit of space. However we saw a space at the bottom of The New Inn’s pub garden, and preferring a pint of beer to a pint of milk, we opted to moor as patrons, and enjoy the antics of the cows from a safe distance.
Perhaps its not just the cows we need to watch out for
We were well rewarded with antics when one of the cows got too close to the edge and had fallen in. The combination of the current and the steep bank meant that the cow was struggling to climb out. Some well meaning walkers called the firebrigade who dutifully turned up to assess the situation only to discover that she had climbed out unaided further downstream. They didn’t seem to mind, there wasn’t a lot else going on on a chilly grey bank holiday.
Thats a lot of cows
We left them to it and went to explore the village, stopping at the Fish and Chip shop
The fish and chips were worth stopping for
It had been a goal to reach Lechlade for some years now, as it holds fond childhood memories. I think I was about 7 when I helped my dad build a Canadian canoe. We then drove from our home in Liverpool to Trewsbury Mead, near Cirencester to see the spring which is hailed to be the source of this great River, in those days Old Father Thame’s statue still marked the spot until he was moved to St Johns lock in 1974. Its actually one of several springs in the area, but its unusual to see water flowing from it.
We continued our homage in our VW combi, following the growing river for about 15 miles through pretty Cotswold villages until we reached Lechlade, the first navigable section, where we set off as a family of four, mum, dad me and my younger brother paddling our way down to Windsor, pitching our tent to camp along the way. (We’d actually launched, ie tested it was water tight, the canoe in the Leeds and Liverpool canal at Lydiate.) Such a pity I don’t have any photos of this transformative holiday. However I do have some lovely memories. Eric and I walked up to the Round House which marks the joining point of the Thames and Severn canal with the river, which is probably the spot where we launched our canoe.
The roundhouse (former lock keepers cottage) at Lechlade
Sadly the weather, and being on patrons only mooring didn’t motivate us to stay more than one night in Lechlade, and depending upon how our Thames adventure pans out we might well come back to explore this pretty place.
Looking down from the bridge to us moored at the New Inn
In
March 2022 I finally wired the new solar panels on our electic narrowboat, increasing
the capacity of our solar panel array from 1KW to 1.5KW.
I
also improved the electronics that monitors the power we get from our solar
panels and the power in and out of our battery.
I was interested to see how much of the electricity we use for propulsion came from our solar panels. It is nice to see that even in April we got 2.5 times the power we used for propulsion, and 56% of our total electricity from our solar panels.
Sources of electricity • Solar panels – 117.5 KWhrs (56%) • Genset – 63 KWhrs (30%) (2 hrs per week) • Battery – 28.5 KWhrs (14%)
Cruising Stats 67miles traveled # 40:40 hours crusing time # 0.71 KWhrs per mile cruised 1.17 KWhrs per hour cruised # Note: this includes cruising upstream on the Thames for 24 miles.
I try to collate these figures every month but as experience
proved from last year sharing them is not my forte.
Yesterday, when we arrived, there were happy families playing in the river here at Radcot, but this morning it was kagouls not kayaks or cossies. But we needed to push on as we had booked a mooring at St John’s Lock for that night.
Wild mooring has its appeal…. when the sun’s shining
And luckily the showers became more intermittent and the locks were manned
Grafton Lock
Despite it being a bank holiday weekend the river was quiet, probably a good job looking at all the twists and turns we had to navigate
Even Lewis Hamilton would take this hairpin slowly
After two hours we were quite glad to moor up under the watchful eye of Old Father Thames
Old Father Thames, with the addition of a shovel
One of the benefits of river cruising is the availability of electric charging points along the way. And the Environment Agency gives mooring priority to electric boats. The downside is that they ask that you book 48 hours in advance, which we had done, but then had to cruise in the drizzle this morning to arrive on time. But equally so, we were able to plan to arrive with a low battery reading and leave the next day fully charged with enough power for a week or more.
I don’t often get the opportunity to do a full maintenance check on our
batteries, but with Cheryl planning to be off the boat for 10 days in March, I wouldn’t
be cruising, or baking cakes for that matter, so an ideal time to do it.
To do this I needed to run the batteries down to being practically
empty.
The last time I did this was over three years ago so I was interested to see :
how much out of balance they were,
whether any capacity had been lost.
The simple answer to both questions is :- not enough to care about.
The result showed such a miniscule out of balance reading of 0.09% that I didn’t need to take any action at all. However, as I had got the battery to this state, I took the opportunity to add 1Ahr to the two lowest cells and 0.5Ahr to one other cell to restore the battery balance.
I used some software on my PC to show the voltage of each cell in the battery to aid me balance them.
LiFePO4 Cell Monitoring Software
I measured the capacity of the battery as I recharged them to full and found no measurable drop in capacity after 5 years of continuous daily use, which is very reassuring.
With Firecrest’s battery being out of balance by just 0.09% I can safely ignore the often-repeated myth that LiFePO4 batteries need re-balancing on every cycle.
There are two take-away points from this:
Firecrest’s LiFePO4 battries do not appear to have deteriated at all in over 5 years of daily use.
Re-balancing of our LiFePO4 battery does not need to be done often, even after 3 years it was not necessary.
We woke to a beautiful misty morning full of promise
So off we set, bright and early, well earlyish as it was before 10am. The paddlers and rowers were out on the river but we hadn’t seen any other narrowboats until we saw one coming downstream, it was Ian and Irene on NB Freespirit.
Here comes Freespirit
We both got our cameras out to snap each other
Smile we’re on camera
But Irene is much more up to date with their blog and posted first. It’s not often we get photos of the two of us cruising.
Thankyou Irene
We hadn’t set ourselves a destination to aim for today but the sun was now beaming down on us and it was a real pleasure to be out on the water. Lots of different sorts of bridges from what we are used to on the canals, some wooden,
Shifford footbridge
some stone,
The very old NewBridge
Beautiful blue skies, albeit it criss crossed with contrails
And some cosy woodland
Although some of the trees did make us chuckle
and plenty of cows probably chuckling at us.
and plenty of cows probably chuckling at us.
We moored up just before Radcot, we’d been cruising for nearly 7 hours which is a lot for us and if truth be told 2 hours longer than we ought to have been out in the sun. But as we were approaching a bank holiday we weren’t expecting it to last, and sure enought it was raining before bedtime.
Back in January we declared our intentions to cruise 110miles south to reach the River Thames in Oxford. 4 months later we have made it. That’s near enough 120 miles 120 days (we added a few miles on doing some of the Birmingham loops)
Highlights January to April
Believe it or not, we didn’t actually cruise a mile every day, but despite a few rough moments, storm Dudley, loosing my phone, loosing all the water in a canal, and recently loosing David, its been a good few months of a new adventure. And about a month later than we thought, we are finally here, leaving the Oxford Canal and going through Dukes Cut onto the River Thames.
Stop lock on Dukes Cut
Duke’s cut was built by George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough, to enable him to take advantage of Warwickshire coal, by joining the canal to the river. Today it’s home to a small group of permanent moorers, which could make two way traffic tricky, but we were lucky and didn’t meet anyone.
Think we wil turn right
We hadn’t got the nicest of travelling days to move onto the Thames, but it didn’t take us long to reach Eynsham Lock and a lovely warm welcome from a lock keeper to show us the ropes. We’ve attached our long ropes for locking, got our anchor and mud weights ready to deploy if necessary and rescued the life savers from bottom of the cupboard just in case we fall overboard, so we are river ready. There’s plenty of quirky things to see and as we left the lock, she pointed out the Swinford toll bridge.
Leaving Eynsham Lock
Its one of two toll bridge that remain over the Thames. Motorists have to pay the owner the pricely fee of 5p and endure the privilege of long queues to do so, and regularly campaign to abolish the toll. But with 10000 vehicles using it daily, it doesn’t take a calculator to work out why the owners don’t want to forfeit this tax free golden goose. George III also decreed that no other bridge was allowed to be built within 3 miles of Swinford Bridge.
No Toll, but we do have a Gold Licence
Our next lock Pinkhill, was self service, which gave us a better opportunity to look around and see the wheel wind, so much easier than using a windlass. Raised Red equals paddles open, raised white equal paddles closed.
The weather really wasn’t inspiring for cruising, so we moored up for lunch at the Pinkhill picnic mooring . Another new treat for us knocking pins into a field.
Pinkhill Picnic Mooring
And as soon as we decided to call it a day the sun came out
We don’t really know Oxfordshire but we do know its a canal we would like to cruise again. Its very pretty, there’s plenty of variety, and apart from a couple of rogue booze cruise hirers very peaceful. We managed to set off from the quarry without Eric falling in.
That could have ended badly
And enjoyed the bluebells along the way
And some of last years tall reeds
Through some more woods
And some open fields, this one had sheep goats and alpaca grazing, but Eric was more excited to see Whitehill satellite earth station at Enslow. It’s one he may have visited during his early engineering days.
Whitehill Satellite earth station
The next lock took us onto the River Cherwell and we instantly felt the boat speed up without us touching the throttle, (or bottle for that matter) It’s amazing how much the width of the river increases the efficiency of our transit.
The Cherwell at Shipton
But it wasn’t to last as we were squeezed into one of those odd shaped locks, known as coffin locks,
Shipton weir lock
to take us the last few twists around to Thrupp. We were lucky to get moored in, and while everyone else was looking at the beautifully kept village, we were both looking at the mooring edge and thinking the same thing. Its clean, its low and its a perfect edge to paint the gunwale from.
The popular Thrupp Visitor Moorings
We hadn’t intended to stay more than one night at Thrupp, but it was too good an opportunity to miss.
A good place to relax
So whilst Eric exercised his artistic talent with the paintbrush, I got my spinning wheel out and enjoyed a few hours in the sunshine.
Spinning in the sun
We weren’t the only ones taking advantage of this lovely spot,
Brian the Blacksmith had set up shop and I was very tempted with his dragon But it was beyond my pocket money budget and I if I’m honest I knew I’d have trouble finding a place for it to live and be admired.
And out of the fire came a dragon
Thrupp really is a lovely place, whilst Eric was painting I enjoyed walking into Kidlington and along river and I’m sure we want to moor here again, if only so Eric can paint the other side to match,
I wonder how long it will look so smart
And because there was a function going on we decided not to go for a pint of bitter at the Boat, which is where Lewis and Morse used go to unwind at the end of a hard case.
“Where are you this weekend Mum?” ….“Banbury” ….. “I’ll be arriving on the 14:56” …..and so we set off cruising late and only made it as far as Haynes lift bridge on Friday, but at least we had a crew.
Hello Tim, nice to have company aboard
It’s a pleasant mooring just beyond Banbury. It gave our city boy son enough fresh air that he slept like a log and we had a lazy start to the weekend. So whilst I waited for the men to wake up, I stuck my head outside to say hello to fellow bloggers on NB Freespirit, who are making the same journey as we are but with a tighter timescale. And I have to say, it has made me smile that we’ve unwittingly snapped very similar photos but we managed to snap Firecrest and Freespirit moored together.
Yes thats NB Freespirit moored ahead of us
We saw many things that made us smile over the weekend. And whilst seeing a smartly dressed paddle gear made me groan, it was Tim who took the time to read its message….Kings Norton lock
I like the odd spot of clever graffiti, and as these paddle gears have been out of action for a while.
We made sure Tim earnt his keep working the locks for us
Helpful visitors are always welcome
But most of the lift bridges on the South Oxford are usually kept open these days
Haddens Lift Bridge near Nell Bridge House farm
Word had filtered through from boats travelling north that the Chisnell lift bridge was misbehaving in the strong winds so we called it a day and moored up for the night. What could be better than mooring opposite a field of fluffy sheep
Until they realise what’s for tea
As always when Tim comes to visit, (or any other visitors for that matter) I do feel a compulsive need to feed him well and our weekend was punctuated with cooked breakfasts, sumptuous teas and picnics on the go.
On the whole, quite healthy
But we made sure we walked off our calories when we moored up at the quarry near above Pigeons lock and discovered the woods were full of bluebells.
The Quarry woodlands above Pigeons lock
And we all celebrated when we were able to tick off a significant bridge number. Weve seen plenty of 100’s but its nice to see a 200.
Bridge 200
It really has been a lovely weekend, despite some horrible windy moments, its remained dry and the sun has shone most of the time. And the scenery has been lovely
Dashwood lock
But this was were we had to say goodbye for this visit. There is a good footpath from Pigeons lock up to Tackley train station for Tim to return to his own home.
We’ve spent more than a few weeks on the periphery of Banbury this year.
Just north of the Southam Road Footbridge
Its an ideal place for a continual cruiser, with access to facilities and a good train line but we get the impression that the holiday boaters just pass straight through without realising what they might be missing. Ok the canal itself isn’t going to grace many chocolate boxes, but never the less canal users owe a huge debt of gratitude to Tooley’s boat yard slap bang in the centre.
The busy Castle Quay and Tooley’s boatyard
Tooley’s is one of the oldest canal dry docks still in use on our waterways. Built when this section of Oxford Canal was completed at Banbury in 1778 (it finally made it to Oxford in 1790) it has operated continually ever since. There was a bit of uncertainty in the 1980s when the Castle Quay shopping centre was being built but thankfully Banbury is known for its canal campaigners and the little boat yard with its 200 year old forge and dry dock was incorporated into the structure of the centre and the Banbury Museum
Tooley’s before the development (photo from Tooley’s website)
Tooley’s has helped preserve many heritage boats and Hardy, the last wooden boat built by Nursers of Braunston is moored here now.
Afloat but not quite habitable
However the boat most have heard of is Cressy, a wooden hulled boat that Tom Rolt one of the leading campaigners used to preserve our beautiful waterways.
She started life as a horse drawn fly boat in 1915 and after her trading days came to an end she was bought by Tom’s uncle Kyrle Williams. He had her converted to run on steam, but they quickly realised that it was impractical to cruise through tunnels so the steam engine was replaced by a motor from an old model T Ford. Cressy went on to have several other owners until Tom bought her in 1939 and had Tooleys do a complete refit so that he and his first wife Angela could live aboard. They then began a campaign maintain and reinvent the waterways for the benefit of all. If Tom and Angela hadn’t led the way, who knows if anyone else would have fought for what we love so dearly. In 1944 they set up the Inland Waterways Association. There is much much more to this tale, and Tom has ties to many places on the canals, but Banbury is where he set off from on his first campaign. And he is comemorated with a blue plaque and a bridge named after him
Tom Rolt Bridge looking north
Of course Banbury isn’t only famous for its waterways connection, the towns traditions were recorded in a nursery rhyme.
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross, to see a fine lady upon a white horse….. I tried to find out more about its origins, but as with most traditional storytelling words and their meanings have changed over the centuries so I think “you pays your money and takes your pick”
The rhyme we know today was published in 1784 after the canal arrived in Banbury, although I think that is coincidence rather than relevant, as it probably dates back to an early medieval period. The main Banbury cross was demolished by the puritans around 1600 and the current one was built in 1859 to commemorate the marriage of queen Victoria’s eldest daughter.
We’re now heading south on our adventures, but I know there’s more to Banbury still to explore.
Looking down from Tramway bridge, next to Morrisons.
