Today we ticked off another of our big-ticket items for this trip – the Anderton Boat Lift, otherwise known as the ‘Cathedral of the Canals’. Built in 1875 to convey ships down from the canal and onto the River Weaver, it ran up until 1983 when it was closed in need of repairs. It was then restored in 2001-2002 and has been running ever since (excluding a fair few breakdowns!)
You can just turn up and go on the next available lift, with no charge at all, but Sarah was keen to book in advance. It cost all of £5 to do so, and Sarah looked very pleased with herself when we found another two boats waiting before us to go in, but two hadn’t booked so had to wait another 45 minutes.
All in all it takes about half an hour, and then out we popped at the bottom onto the River Weaver.
The river is wide enough that you can turn around pretty much anywhere. It’s not fast flowing so it’s quite relaxing to pootle along. The wildlife seem to like it here; apparently, there are otters in the area, so I’ll be keeping a lookout this evening. In the meantime, we’ll make do with a heron standing on one leg, karate-kid style.
It seemed like only minutes before we reached Northwich, where we just squeezed into a spot on the first pontoon, touching fenders with the boats fore and aft of us. A quick trip to Waitrose to restock on food supplies and the fridge was bursting at the seams.
Replenished, we moved on to Hunt’s Lock. We phoned the lock keeper to let him know we were coming, and were instructed to moor up on the left. We were in for a bit of a wait as another set of boats had just been up, and two more were on their way to come down but wouldn’t get there for 10 minutes, so it was the perfect chance for some lunch. I also finished off the bottle of wine that we no longer had space in the fridge for!
The locks are all manned; we drive in and the lock keeper drops us a rope with a loop on the end, which we then put our centre line through and he pulls it back up and pulls us in. We had three of us in the lock together as they’re quite wide, but with three boats there’s not much space to bump around and the locks filled very gently so it was probably one of the easiest locks ever.
The second lock, Vale Royal, was similar and with the same three boats again. Shortly afterwards we pulled over at the Vale Royal moorings, which everyone has said are a lovely place to stop. At first it was quite busy with fishermen, walkers and cyclists all enjoying the warm weather, but it’s now lovely and peaceful here.
