Onto the River Stort (cruise retrospective)

As soon as we turned onto the Stort, the character of our surroundings changed. The river was narrower than the Lea, and prettier. At times it put us in mind of the South Oxford Canal. The bridges were low, some of them very low. No chimneys would survive. Piles of firewood would be disastrous. Boaters who are not midgets have to duck.

And the locks were even more difficult than the Lea's worst! They're only 13 feet wide, which makes them too narrow for a pair of narrowboats to share. And a single narrowboat has to have both gates opened for it. A single gate width is six inches too narrow! And the gates were still not safe for walking across. But it does seem to be the norm that gates are left open as you leave them, top or bottom. Which makes life a little easier! 

We travelled on through parkland and woodland, past hundreds of trees, mostly willows, we thought; dead, toppled, broken and piled in skeletal heaps, struck down, surely, by some arboreal disease. Such a great shame. A scar on a beautiful landscape.

We stopped for the night right above Hunsdon Mill Lock, a lovely spot with woodland to our right, and large, well-tended gardens on the other side of the canal. Not far away, a pile of wood burned slowly. Garden trees cut down because of disease, leaving huge spaces where once they looked magnificent.

Thursday was unusually boring (cruise retrospective)

We passed through the industrial innards of Tottenham Hale and Edmonton. It was a dull area, grey, rusty and untidy. Rubbish littered the river and its banks, graffiti decked every surface, oil slicked the water for mile after mile. Even some of the boats were dying, and decaying into the river.

But there were some splendid boats amongst the living.

The locks were the most interesting feature of our journey by far. Most of them are fully electrically powered. With some of them it's gates only, with manual paddles. Most are in pairs, but one side is disused, and full of detritus. A couple have one electrically operated and the other manually. Take your pick! 

 The paddle winding mechanisms of those locks which are fully manual were of a type new to me, well maintained and very easy to use.

We met very few moving craft. Birds sat on nests, or busily put the finishing touches to a new build. We came across strange varieties of ducks and geese, possibly crossbreeds. But can Canada Geese really cross with Mandarin Ducks? 

We timed our arrival at our overnight mooring very well. We'd been poured on briefly earlier, having extended our lunch break in an attempt to miss the rain altogether. We chose to stop now about half way between the Waltham Cross and Cheshunt locks, and the weather turned really wet just as we finished tying up. We looked around us and smiled. We'd left the drab and dirty miles behind us. Now we were at the start of something more rural, and far more pleasing.