A cloudy morning but that’s fine by me – we had the 11 locks of the
Wilmcote flight to do.
We passed through Wilmcote where Mary Arden’s house is – but is
it?? Because of confusion about the
actual house inhabited by Mary in the mid-sixteenth century, the term may refer
either of two houses both of which are grade I listed. A house wrongly identified as Mary Arden's
(it actually belonged to a neighbour) was bought by the Shakespeare Birthplace
Trust in 1930 and refurnished in the Tudor style. In 2000 it was discovered that the building
preserved as Mary Arden's house had belonged to a friend and neighbour Adam
Palmer and the house was renamed Palmer's Farm. The house that had belonged to
the Arden family is Glebe Farm, near to Palmer's Farm. A more modest building,
it had been acquired by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 1968 for
preservation as part of a farmyard without knowing its true provenance. The
building has lost some of its original timber framing and features some
Victorian brickwork, but it has been possible to date it through
dendrochronology to c.1514 (this information comes from Wikipedia and I had to
look up what dendrochronology meant! It
is the science or technique of dating events, environmental change, and
archaeological artefacts by using the characteristic patterns of annual growth
rings in timber and tree trunks – so now you know!!)
We arrived at Wilmcote top lock to find another boat in front of us –
just our luck! However, the lock worker
had a bike and was cycling between two locks to prepare the next one. As he left the lock his boat was in he lifted
a paddle to help us out 😊 We came across a stag party boat – 10 young
men all extremely nice and chatty. They
had got stuck in a lock in Stratford last night. Something was behind the gate and they
couldn’t open it – that was at 6pm. They
finally got out at 12.30am!! I did feel
sorry for them but they said that they had had a good time. I asked which one of them was the groom and
they pointed at one chap flat out on the roof – he had obviously had a good
time. I did ask him if he was alive and
I got a thumbs up from him! Good to see
that he had a bottle of water as well as his lager can!
There was a lockie on the middle five locks of the flight and we seemed
to whizz through there.
That just left the last three and they didn’t take long. We had decided not to go into Stratford today
with it being a sunny, summer Sunday. We
will leave that until tomorrow. We
moored up at the bottom of the flight where, sadly, there are no trees, so we
had rather a hot afternoon.
During the afternoon we had a visitor – Percy the homing pigeon! He landed on the gunnel and sat there,
Richard wondered if he was thirsty and offered him water from Muffin’s water
bowl (clean of course!) and he drank readily.
We thought he had gone but when I came down below he was sitting on the
side hatch. He was obviously a well
loved pigeon as he didn’t try to fly away as I passed him – in fact he turned
towards me. I’m not sure when he flew
away but he did!
11 locks
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