The Hodma'dod: There and back again

Amazingly just over two weeks since my last blog so I need to bring you up to date with our journey. We spent two nights down on the Montgomery canal, there is only 7 miles of this open at the moment although they are working on a further quarter of a mile stretch (see below) all with weekend volunteer labour but hope to have it open by next year. Then on towards Llangollen. We moored up at Chirk which is right on the border between England and Wales (I did say in my last post that we had crossed the border and according to my map we had so I assume we ducked back again at some point) to await son Ben and his wife Jenny who were coming for a few days to experience the Pontcysyllte aqueduct crossing. Chirk itself has an aqueduct and that is quite impressive (see below) with a railway crossing as well but it is only about half the height of the famous one.

Chirk also has a very well preserved castle and I cycled up to it and took a few photos. It made me realise they do have proper hills in this part of the world!

Typically of course although we have had super weather most of the time this year the day we set off with Ben and Jenny was miserable being cold and raining hard but that did not dampen the thrill of crossing the aqueduct with a narrow towpath on one side and nothing but a thin sheet of steel the other protecting us from a 126 feet drop. The character of the canal changes dramatically after the aqueduct, no longer going through rolling countryside but very much the hills of Wales. It is also very narrow with only one way working in a couple of spots and we had to send Ben and Sarah off ahead to make sure the way was clear for us to enter. I hate to think what this is like in the height of the summer as even now in mid September the canal was very busy with the majority being hire boats (in the basin at the end of the canal I counted only 5 private boats to 20+ hireboats) most of whom are OK but some who do not think of others, like the boat that was moored outside the Elsan point right next to a sign which said "Please move away from here when finished using the facilities". Sarah had asked them to move on but the request fell on deaf ears "We was told we could moor anywhere along here" and by the time the message that I would need to moor up early was relayed back to me I couldn't reverse back to an empty berth as I had someone behind me and I couldn't breast up as the channel was too narrow so I had to go on and moor down in the basin and then lug the full canister from the loo up hill and down then along the canal for over a quarter of a mile. They were very lucky I didn't empty the whole lot over their boat!

We stayed the permitted two nights in the basin and walked up to the very end of the canal and up to Castell Dinas Bran, the remains of a ruined castle giving fantastic views over the surrounding countryside. The day we had there was not too bad with the rain holding off and sunny intervals although the wind at the ruin was very strong.

So after six weeks of travelling we had reached journeys end and had to set about the return journey. One point of note in returning to Chirk to drop off Ben and Jenny was that as we were crossing the Chirk Aqueduct we were filmed by what was obviously a very professional film crew so I asked what they were filming for and apparently it was for Channel 4 who are making 4 hour long documentaries about the canals with Timothy West and Prunella Scales who are very big narrowboat fans. I did ask if I would get an appearance fee but they didn't seem very interested but it is something to watch out for and it should be on air in the new year.

Yesterday we moored near a village called Marbury which is very small but has an amazing church on the edge of a large mere which is certainly very picturesque and today sees us back at the start of the Llangollen with another visit to Snugberrys Ice cream planned for tomorrow and then we set off down the Shroppie.