When there’s a tide to be caught (Ribble Estuary on Thursday) there are tasks to be done: rubbish to be disposed of and water tank to be filled (Bilsborrow), diesel tank to be filled (Moons Bridge Marina) and canal miles to be covered. It was quite some place, and so tempting was the onsite café that a breakfast for four was enjoyed there on Tuesday morning. Crazy golf anyone, or darts, or ten pin bowling, or a film in the cinema or curling and later that evening (no camera) there were folk on the ice, sweeping and rolling the stones (just as seen on the tele from Winter Olympics in the past!) For further details check out the Flower Bowl Entertainment Centre here.Īcross a different car park lay the anticipated Barton Grange Garden Centre (Awarded Destination Garden Centre of the Year, every year 2012 -2017). But inside this intriguing building are recreational facilities aplenty. There’s a pontoon beside a canal-side car park – though a garden centre and a farm shop were expected. Then beside the Flower Bowl, was the most unlikely mooring. Weaving southwards there are more aqueducts, a salt dome beside the railway line, and a cottage on Shakespeare Road. Leaving Garstang on Monday morning (in sunshine!) there was a clear view of Greenhalgh Castle, a Royalist stronghold in the Civil War. It’s a town of pretty cottages and intriguing plaques. It was the Oxfam Group in Garstang that in 2000 started the Fair Trade town movement. The signs proclaim it as the World’s First Fair Trade Town. Then it’s Garstang, approached from the north this time. Here was the extensive holiday park, all chalets and (im)mobile homes, verandas and pot plants, plastic herons, oh, and that baby broad beam… On a returning route things look different, then suddenly they become familiar. Though familiar with the name, previously there had only ever been a vague idea as to its location…. To the east are the dark slopes of the Forest of Bowland. Somewhere there were more alpacas and a gang of rag dolls on the roof of nb William Wallace. If heading away from the towpath it’d be a tight squeeze here …Įvening visitors were the local swans, parents and a family of nine cygnets! What is it about the Lancaster Canal’s waters that makes swans here such successful breeders?Īway from Galgate on Sunday morning the boats headed the 8 miles to Garstang: past the graceful bridge to the Glasson Branch and under the ornamental Ellel Grange Bridge. Take, in heavy rain, a wide beam boat making the slowest ever turn, a stop-start sort of continuation towards a bridge-hole, a backing off, some hand flapping and some shouted words about his new canopy…Ī clearance in the weather an hour or so later allowed for a stroll down (and this actually was downhill) along the Glasson Branch, passing the first three of those six mighty locks. The canal may not have been going downhill but when the weather goes downhill so too does the mood. There were heads amongst the trees, a barge pole wielded, a swapping of helmsman, an offer from Cleddau of a tow… These incidents happen, resolutions are found – and the cruising continues. A narrow boat came charging through the bridge hole from the opposite direction, crashing into the offside undergrowth. Close contact between steel boats and flimsier cruisers is not advised. It does go on and on – approaching the tall Bridge 91 a small cruiser was seen moored up very near to the bridge. Once beyond the city limits the canal threads through the lengthy tree-lined Deep Cutting. Silver Fox, a mile or so from the city boundary The journey south eventually got under way: the wonderful meadow within the city boundaries seemed almost over-populated: cattle, sheep, alpacas, ducks, swans and their ten cygnets.Ī last glimpse of Lancaster Castle and the Priory Church The Captain, for his part, wanted to talk narrow boat solar panels… Tales were swapped of respective Ribble Crossing exploits here is the latest Foxes Afloat vlog, watch it to see them boating on an incoming tide on the River Douglas, on the wide waters of the Ribble Estuary and along the flooded ditch that is the Savick Brook… Ribble Link anecdotes over, it was on to advice as to what to see and where to moor. Although still moored outside of the city they had walked in on a preliminary recce. Saturday started with a surprise: Cleddau’s boating companions out of Liverpool, Shaun and Colin from Silver Fox, materialised in Lancaster. Lancaster southbound to Preston: 28 miles
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