It rained hard most of the night, the only rain in 17 days and remarkably it had stopped by this morning so we have had yet another dry day. As you can see from the picture taken yesterday the ground is cracked and rock hard.
As mentioned in yesterdays blog we moored overnight in a place called Weedon Bec which has an ordnance depot built when Napoleons invasion was expected. It was used it to store gunpowder, small arms and cannon. The canal used to run through the middle of it via a port cullis gate but access has been cut off by the railway.
It was also a secret emergency base for Government should the invasion take place, the theory was the canal was the fastest means of travel for the politicians and Weedon is the furthest point in Britain from the sea, so a long way from any action. It was used as an ordnance store until the 1960’s, the buildings are now occupied by small businesses including several restoring classic cars.
The visitor centre was of course closed due to covid but the antique shops were open, so we could wander round looking at antiques for sale but not those just for show, a bit of a quirk of the current restrictions.
We then turned round and headed back to our main route through 7 very large locks. Going the other way yesterday we teamed up with another boat which halved the workload. The locks are wide enough for two boats side by side. Today no such luck, we were on our own and most of the locks were against us.
Tomorrow we will get back to the hire boat base by the evening and probably drive home, we could stay on the boat overnight but as we have to hand it back at 9.30 Friday morning there seems little point in staying.
So I will probably post the final blog entry from the comfort of home on Friday morning.