Heading North up the Coventry.

Long day today, left the bottom of Atherstone at 0900 and arrived here, just north of Hopwas Wood, at 1430, cold, wet and fed up.

After watering at Bradley Green we passed Grendon Dock

with this wooden motor obviously under restoration.

Just past Polesworth Pooley Hall looms over the cut

and a brightly painted pit head winding gear wheel marks the site of the nearby colliery.

Landscaped spoil tips are a reminder of the vast tonnage of coal dug from this area

and the array of working boats at Alvecote remind us how it was transported.

By the time we reached Glascote Locks the rain had set in, Jill waits for the infamously slow top lock to fill. On lock flights we now use walkie talkies, it saves the stentorian bellowing to each other and the misunderstandings that so easily arise.

Fazeley Junction(It started hailing on us here) and the Birmingham and Fazeley heads off towards the mysterious environs of the B.C.N. In fact the we are now on the B.C.N. as can be seen by the typical Birmingham practice of naming,

not numbering the bridges. The Birmingham actually constructed this stretch of the Coventry as that company had run out of money and seemed to have lost interest in heading north whilst the B & F was desperate to hook up with the Trent and Mersey, so they got stuck in and made the connection and so it remains, an eighteenth century anomaly.