Salt – Narrowboat Firecrest

We have a bit of time on our hands as we wait until Nick can fit us in to have the port holes fixed so we have been mooching around Middlewich for longer than usual. It’s not high on the tourist attraction list, usually a place we pass through without exploring. Although King’s Lock chippy is an essential port of call. It does one of the best plates of fish and chips on the cut.

Are we getting old? Even sharing a portion of chips seems too much these days.

The mooring at Booth Lane is nice and wide, has rings and has full sun all day, so you could say almost perfect, but the downside is the road noise. It’s relentless and pervasive, so we unchained the boat and set off through Kings Lock

Down King’s Lock going past the Middlewich branch

And moved to the other side of town, where it’s also wide, has rings and (when its not cloudy) is in full sun. And despite being closer to walk to the supermarket than Booth Lane, has a rural tranquility, definitely perfect.

Eric settled down to work whilst I settled down to do a bit of exploring. Middlewich is a town that is built upon salt, being the middle of the three wich towns, the other two being Northwich and Nantwich. With wich being the suffix meaning salt town. Of course the Roaming Romans took advantage of this gold mine and the confluence of several rivers to build themselves a settlement here. Being an explorer myself, I saw the reference to the Roman fort on my OS map so I followed the foot path over the canal bridge, and through a pretty wooded area

into Harbutts field to see for myself.

Just in case I’d missed something I walked around the other side to check out the view from the west

And to be sure from the south

OK I confess I may have got the north south east west orientations out of order but you get the impression. At least there were info boards to help me see what I was looking at.

And this is board 7 so there must be more…

As we cruised through the town I’d seen a standing stone just off the canal near the Andersen hire boat yard, so I thought I’d investigate Middlewich’s prehistoric culture.

Alas there was no info board, or dedication plaque, so I’m non the wiser as to how and why this Monolith appeared. With a Scandinavian name like Andersen, I wonder if the vikings also came to take advantage of the salt pans, and the carving on the rock face really is a longboat not a modern narrowboat.
However undeterred I wandered back to the boat via the High Street and discovered a good butchers, which we will return to on our next visit. Middlewich really isn’t a tourist attraction, but its home to around 15000 people, and although somewhat run down in areas, is a very useful stopping place for boaters like us, just not for a whole week.

Plan C is to travel south, aiming towards Rugby by mid summer. We might take a detour through some of the Birmingham canals that we’ve not yet cruised but we’re taking full advantage of our new found freedom to decide later.

First we were going to call in to Uplands Marina for an overnight stop. We had completely forgotten to include the side hatch window inserts in the repaint contract, and honestly who would want blue curtains on a green boat. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ As soon as we realised, Nick offered to do them whilst we cruised up to Lymm.

Sometimes blue and green make the perfect combo

Plus we still had some electricity left on the meter so we might as well charge up the batteries, especially as we still haven’t replaced the solar panels that were removed before our repaint. Not having our full solar capacity was most frustrating when we were enjoying a mini heatwave.

Leaving the lovely spring greens behind

we travelled through the 2000 year old salt mines and brine pits of Eastern Northwich, past the Victorian Lion Salt works, which is now a fascinating museum and well worth a visit.