Monday 10th October

It was quite a windy night but fortunately it was blowing up the canal and not sideways, so the plants stayed upright. We left Barbridge and started wending our way southwards towards Nantwich. We seemed to be lucky as it was quite bright over us but looked to be very black all around us! We stopped for water at Nantwich Basin, this used to be the junction of the Chester Canal and the Birmingham and Liverpool Canal. Telford built the Birmingham and Liverpool Canal high on an embankment round Nantwich at a terrific cost as the owners of Dorfold Hall refused to allow the canal to cross their land. The Chester Canal was completed in 1779 and the Birmingham and Liverpool in 1835 but the two merged in 1845 and this was followed in 1846 by the formation of the Shropshire Union Railways and Canal Company. The photo of the horse (right) is the renowned Nantwich wooden horse which stands canal. It used to be lock gates until two artists, John Merrill (who recycled the wood) and Julian Taylor (who did the iron work) came along and produced the very solid sculpture. We moored up on Telford’s embankment and walked into Nantwich. It was quite a long walk down Welsh Row but there are some lovely black and white properties along there, I think the Cheshire Cat Hotel was my favourite and was built in the early 17th Century. It looked as if someone had tried to push it over (I didn’t have my camera with me so pinched this photo off the internet). We did our shopping and wandered around then back to Mary H where I did more research on our trip to Italy :-)