Busy at Castlefield

The grapevine was right, there were a lot of boats from Lymm Cruising Club arriving in Castlefield this weekend.

From the top of the Reconstructed Grocer’s Warehouse.
A few arrived on Friday night, but more were heading in this morning as we headed out of town.

More boats join the fray.
They’d be struggling to find somewhere to moor. I hope they’re all good friends, several boats were already breasted up as we eased our way out of the basin.

Grocer’s Warehouse Arm
We counted at least a dozen LCC boats heading in.

I had a good look round the Da Vinci exhibition at MOSI yesterday. Interesting, giving an insight into what made the man tick. It seems a lot of his ideas were actually based on earlier Greek or Roman discoveries, but he was able to develop them into practical applications. Apart from being a brilliant artist, perfecting a technique which gave life to his portraits, his most important contribution was probably his studies of the workings of the human body. As an engineer he discounted the mysticism and concentrated on the mechanisms that made the body work. Then I had a look around a couple of the other displays before joining Mags and Meg back on the boat.

Just walking around the basin area is interesting:-

On top of the rebuilt Grocer’s Warehouse, part of the original machinery for lifting coal from the canal boats up to street level.
Three Railway Viaducts.
The near one was built around 1849. The wrought iron trellis construction of the Cheshire Lines Company viaduct sits alongside and was built around 1875. The final one, of which the massive tubular steel supports can be seen, was built in 1890 by the Northern Railway Company.

From further back, showing the modern footbridge from where the previous photo was taken.
We left this morning at around 10, and made a stop at Pomona Lock to have a look at the Manchester Ship Canal.

Looking towards Salford Quays from Pomona Lock
The derelict Hulme Lock, which was replaced by Pomona Lock as the link to the Ship Canal.
It was still warm today, but with hazy sunshine. We pushed on out of town, to our regular stop near Dunham Massey. I think the time has come to adopt our normal summer cruising strategy; find somewhere pleasant to stop on Friday afternoon and stay put until Monday. It’s been very busy on the water today. Good job there’s no locks on this canal else there’d have been some queueing!

Locks 0, miles 9½