Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Foulridge Wharf to Southfield Bridge.

After we left the short term moorings at Foulridge and moved round the corner, we found that the canal bank was low enough to make painting the tumblehomes possible.

They got painted a year ago when we were out of the water at Hawne Basin, but despite our best efforts to avoid the more sticky-out bits of the canal system, tumblehome paint is often the sacrificial pawn in the gentle game of narrow-boating. We’ve decided that if we get the opportunity we’re going to give them a rub down and a fresh coat of paint each year. We just needed a low bank and a day or two without rain, followed by a week of not going anywhere while the paint hardened off.

Of course once you’ve done one side you have to turn it round to do the other, which meant we had a couple of hours boating to the next windy ‘ole. Luckily, no-one had pinched our spot when we got back. Now it’s all shiny again, ready for another year.

We’ve had this idea that if we tilt the boat over towards the bank using ratchet straps, we can go round the other side in the dinghy and put some blacking on the waterline. We’ve got as far as blowing the dinghy up and messing about in the water in it,

and it’s now on the roof awaiting further action.

The Skipton Waterways Festival was on while we were at Foulridge so on the Saturday, along with David and Kate, we went to have a look.

It was very well attended, lots of boats and lots of people. This year’s theme was Cartoon Characters and we thought the amount of effort people had put into decorating their boats was outstanding. There was an illuminated parade of boats on the Sunday evening so we went back again to see. That was brilliant! Strings of LEDs and rope lights everywhere.

On bank holiday Monday we went to the widely advertised Preston Boat Jumble. It was a bit of disappointment really, firstly by not being at Preston, secondly by not having much for narrowboats, and thirdly for costing £3 each to get in and then being smaller than most village car-boot sales. But we did come home with a big bag of string, in which Dave is going to tie interesting knots.

The rest of the week at Foulridge was a bit cold and damp, keeping us indoors doing crafty things, but the following Sunday our fortnight was up, there was a slight break in the weather and we moved up to the 48hr moorings outside the Anchor Inn at Salterforth. We were joined for this monumental one-and-a-half mile journey by Liz, Jim, Charlotte and Chris; all of whom live nearby and are friends of ours from the 2CV club. None of them had visited the boat before, but hopefully, while we’re on their patch, they’ll be regulars. We’ll be counting on their help when we get to Bingley and the three and five rise staircases.

From Salterforth we went over what was once the Lancashire / Yorkshire border and moored up about quarter of a mile before the locks at Greenberfield, just outside Barnoldswick. Over the years the border has shifted back and forth and is currently on the other side of the town. It seems that If you come from Barnoldswick you were either born in Yorkshire or Lancashire, depending on which day of the week it was. We like Barnoldswick; we found two teapots in ten minutes in the charity shops and some delicious pies and sausage rolls in Hutchinson’s Home-made Pie Shop. We’re not entirely sure how to pronounce it though. Apparently, if you’re from Lancashire it’s Barlick,(rhymes with garlic) and if you’re a Yorkshire-man it’s Barnoldswick. What it’s not is Barnoldswick, which is what we were calling it till we met a very nice local lady out walking her dog. The canal is getting noticeably busier now; summer cruisers are out and about and we’re seeing hire boats going past us quite regularly. Greenberfield locks are very pretty and there are always people around. There are some permanent moorings, a sanitary station and a café and it’s also where Kennet moors, although at the moment she’s in Bingley.

Something else we’ve noticed since there have been more daylight hours, is how well our solar panels are coping now that we’ve got a new fridge. We can go for a week without running the engine or the genny and still have a green light on our super high-tech battery control and monitoring console. We still need the genny for the spin-drier and the bigger power tools, but for any 240v appliance bellow 400w we just use sunshine and the inverter. That’s all the chargers, the liquidizer, the printer and so forth. Last year we were topping the batteries up every three or four days so it just shows how rubbish our old fridge was. Hindsight is a wonderful thing; when we bought the boat there was a weird smell in the kitchen and it puzzled us for ages. Now we know it was refrigerant that had soaked into the floor and it all makes sense.

After a nearly month on the summit level and week above Greenberfield we moved Legend down the locks,

round a few bends, over the current Lancashire / Yorkshire border and moored up again.

Another one-and-a-half mile monumental expedition. There’s just so much to see round here, we don’t want to miss any of it.

We’re walking whenever we get the opportunity; we’ve Beaten the Bounds round Foulridge, when we dicovered that if you walk across a sheep field with a bag of crisps you become very poular.

We've done some more bits of the Pendle Way and, as it uses a section of the Leeds and Liverpool tow-path just up from where we are, we’ve ventured onto the hallowed ground of the Pennine Way a couple of times.

You meet some very earnest walkers on the Pennine way. Not for them the technical clothing and carbon fibre ski-poles that you see bristling from your average flock of Sunday afternoon tow-path ramblers, no. No, for them it’s all about big rucksacks, corduroy trousers and striding purposefully. The very nice local lady with a dog that we met recommended walking up Weets Hill. “The views are fantastic, on a clear day you can see Blackpool Tower.” The day we chose was far from clear and we couldn’t see very much of anything at all, but it was still a good walk and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

There were lambs in the fields, ducklings on the canal and bluebells in the woods. And we’ve already seen Blackpool Tower.

Leeds & Liverpool Canal. Burnley to Foulridge Wharf.

Walking up Pendle Hill turned out to be just as big an undertaking as we thought it might. Armed with extra drinks, maps and a GPS compass app we strode forth from our mooring at the bottom of Barrowford Locks, and followed the Pendle Way towards the South Face Ascent.

When we managed to find it, we thought that the path, as it passed both Ogden reservoirs and climbed ever upward onto the Lancashire moorland, was dramatic and fairly strenuous.

That illusion was irrevocably shattered when we started to come down the East Face. Imagine the stairs in a Victorian terrace. Now imagine them made out of uneven stones. Now imagine them half a mile long.

At the bottom our legs were like jelly, but what a view!

A couple of days later we walked up the locks and over the top of Foulridge Tunnel to have recce at the moorings on the other side. On our way up we came across this odd looking contraption and its owner, John Wonfor.

John’s rather ambitious mission for this summer, (if and when it arrives) is to visit the four corners of the inland waterways on a 16’ catamaran with a camping chair and a car top tent strapped to it, in order to raise money for Macmillan Nurses. Highly commendable, mad as a hatter. We helped him through the bottom two locks and brought him on board Legend for tea and cake - as we do – and gave him a map of the inland waterways, which we don’t think he’d really looked at till then.

If you’re interested, the four navigable corners of the joined up system are: North - Tewitfield on the Lancaster, West – Llangollen on the…er… Llangollen, South – Godalming on the Wey Navigation and East – Brandon on the Little Ouse. They are, as it happens, our goals as well, although we intend to take a much more leisurely approach to achieving them and plan to visit everything in between as we go.

Talking of visiting things, as a way of saying goodbye to Burnley we drove up to this.

This is the “Singing Ringing Tree”. Some of the tubes have slots in them which the wind blows over, making a low hum, a bit like blowing over a bottle. When we were there the wind was doing a hoolie so we re-named it the Moaning Groaning Tree. That’s Pendle Hill in the background. Looking at that photo makes our knees hurt.

After carefully studying the weather forecast for a week at the bottom of Barrowford Locks we picked what looked like the best boating day and started up the flight.

It all went super smoothly to start with; in fact when Alan turned up to lend a hand we were perfectly placed in the third lock right by the car park. Spot on. It was only after the forth that it all went wrong. Within five minutes the weather went from absolutely fine to very wet and very windy with the towpath on the windward side, and in the scramble to get moored up before being blown into the reeds we managed to ram the bank – hard. The resounding crash that echoed from the cabin when we hit turned out to be most of our crockery exiting the cupboard and throwing itself, Life of Brian style, to the floor. We also broke the ornament we brought back from New Zealand, the one that gives us Good Luck over Water. Fat lot of good that did, eh? In our defence, the forecast had been fine and it was raining, cold and windy, but at the end of the day it was all down to rushing about when we really didn’t need to. One of us was on the bank with the front rope round a bollard and it wouldn’t have hurt to just let the wind swing the back out instead of trying to fight it and bashing into the wall. No lasting damage though, a bit of blacking lost, some new crockery needed and a lesson learned. If in doubt, slow down.

When the rain stopped we carried on up the flight, by this time another boat had come up behind us so for the first time since the staircase on the Millennium Link we found ourselves paired up for the top three. They were on their way to the Skipton Waterways Festival, which sounds like a good thing to go and have a visit to. So we will. We’re also going to have a look at the Preston Boat Jumble on the bank holiday Monday

Meanwhile we’re moored up at Foulridge Wharf after coming through the mile long tunnel.

There are showers and a café and a car park here so it’s all very nice. There’s also a sign that says “Three Days Max” which is very faint and you’d be excused for not noticing it, but there’s a perfectly good mooring spot a couple of hundred yards further on, just before the county border, so were going to be good and shuftie up.

Leeds & Liverpool Canal. Altham Bridge to Burnley

After the wind had died down a bit and we’d moved from the shelter of a wall into the open with views over the moors, Altham Bridge was lovely.

While we were there we had a trip to Chesterfield for Dave’s annual eye MOT, a day litter picking with the local IWA branch, and when there wasn’t a howling gale going on (and sometimes when there was) went walking on the surrounding moors.

While the views are stunning round here, we did find ourselves on what we now refer to as the Pointless Style & Gate Walk.

We also went to a meeting held by the local IWA branch which included a talk about Kennet; a L&L Short boat that the Leeds and Liverpool Canal Society own and operate. The Friends of Kennet are a very enthusiastic and friendly bunch who have put an awful lot of time and effort into restoring this beautiful boat and now put just as much time and effort into maintaining and moving it around, and to welcoming as many people as possible on board in order to educate visitors and raise interest in the history of the L&L and canals in general. We found the talk especially interesting, as we’d been queued behind it while we waited to go across the Ribble to Preston last year. Humble appologies for calling it a Mersey Flat.

From there we moved up to Knotts Bridge, which on the map looked a bit close to the motorway, but in fact was lovely.

Dave did a very productive firewood scavenge

and got a lot of the new engine room panels painted while Ann-Marie finished the last curtain tie-backs.

Our next stop was Rose Grove, where there is a very nice shower block, off-side moorings and a car park which gets locked at night. Legend was there for one night; the next afternoon David & Kate came to stay and we moved into Burnley. (The car was there for nearly a week due to the car park being locked up the first time we went back to get it; sometimes things don’t go quite to plan.)

We moored outside the Inn On The Wharf right in the middle of Burnley.

Just like Wigan, we’d heard tales of doom about staying there; our opinion is that the more boats are seen moored in towns the more boats are likely to moor in towns. Anyway, we’ve had a week here and it’s been surprisingly quiet and peaceful. We’re on one side of the famous Weaver’s Triangle where a lot of work has, and still is being done to restore and re-generate the remaining mills, workers cottages, engine houses and other buildings.

It’s already quite impressive and when it’s all finished it will be spectacular. A look round the little museum in the former toll house was very informative and gave us an insight into what the place would have been like 150 years ago when it was the centre of the cotton weaving world.

Then.

Now.

In the town we’ve found Brambles Café,

which could prove to be a costly discovery if we’re not careful and there’s a Tesco Deathstar here as well – also costly. Just round the corner is the mile-long Burnley Embankment from which you get fabulous views over row upon row of terrace roofs and chimney pots,

grand municipal buildings and the Turf Moor football stadium. And if that’s not enough to inspire you, (we’re sorry Steve, but quite frankly, it’s not) there is always Pendle Hill beckoning in the distance.

Nickleson’s describe the Burnley Embankment as one of the seven wonders of the inland waterways. Without resorting to google we reckon the other six must be the Anderton Lift, the Pontypontycyclisty Aqueduct, the Bingley Five Rise, the Barton Swing Aqueduct, the Standedge Tunnel and our boat.

Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Whins Bridge to Altham Bridge

Last week, for the first time ever, we locked Legend up and went away for ten days. We emptied the fridge, shut the gas, electricity and water off, took all the loose stuff off the roof and stowed it in the engine room, packed our suitcases and drove away. The longest we’ve left it unattended before was for a long weekend and after our recent incident we were a tad trepidatious. We chose our mooring site very carefully; we needed somewhere non-rural but close enough to civilisation to be walked past regularly, somewhere not visible from a main road but accessible with a convenient parking place. Whin’s Bridge ticked all our boxes and happily proved to be perfectly safe. While we were away we kept finding ourselves watching dramatic-looking weather forecasts predicting Alaskan storms engulfing the UK, and returned after nine days expecting to have to dig our boat out of a snow drift, but apart from a little heap on the towpath, which had been sheltered by the boat there was very little to show for it.

Actually that’s not strictly true; all the Pennine passes were closed on the way home, there are still snow sculptures overhanging hedges and ditches everywhere and there is an enormous drift on the road near where we parked that we had to drive round with all four wheels on the pavement. So yes, the weather forecast was right and there was a bit of disruption after all.

We’d left the bird table up while we were away and came back to find it continuously visited by no end of hungry birds who, like us had been caught out by the cold snap. Hopefully it won’t last for long; there must be lots of newly hatched youngsters struggling for life at the moment.

Oddly the canal itself wasn’t frozen until Thursday morning, and even then it was only patchy. By then we’d moved up few miles to a little hamlet called Withnell Fold which has cobbled streets and a set of stocks.

After 48hrs on the moorings there we set off again to the Boatyard Inn at Riley Green where Frankie and Harry came on board for an Easter cruise through Blackburn.

There isn’t much in the way of pretty in Blackburn,

it’s mostly grey urban or grey industrial but there are the odd gems

the six locks are interesting, there are the remains of some lime-kilns along with the basin which served them

and Eanam Wharf, where we moored up for the night, is very impressive.

Due to there being too much water coming down the locks, and due to there being two wide-beam working boats moored in the smallest pound in the flight, we managed to flood the pavement outside the lock-keepers office. Technically it was the lock-keeper’s fault as he was setting the next lock and sent all the water down, but it was us everyone was pointing at.

On Easter Saturday we went Church,

which is a suburb of Accrington, next to Oswaldtwistle, where we shared a mooring with about forty Canada geese.

It is the half-way point from Liverpool to Leeds and there’s a thingy to mark the spot;

63 5/8 miles from both ends. F&H went off on Sunday and on Monday we cast off and carried on into the teeth of a gale, to the middle of nowhere overlooking the moors. “Mooring” in more ways than one.

We’ll be here for a few days on our own. Dave is going to finish the engine room and Ann-Marie is going to get the last curtain tie-back done and get stuck into some spring cleaning. As soon as the outside temperature improves, we’ll be giving the tumblehomes their annual lick of paint and putting a coat of blacking from there down to the water-line.

Post code for here is BB5 5US

Leeds & Liverpool Canal. Whittle-le-Woods to Whin's Bridge.

It all got a bit farcical with our gennie. On Tuesday it was mended and dispatched back to us. On Wednesday, due to a “misunderstanding with the courier” it turned up back at Genpower. Their MD must have used several choice phrases before sending a very apologetic email ensuring us it really would be with us on Friday. It finally arrived at David & Kate’s house at about 3pm; just in time for us to pick it up on the way to Kate’s birthday weekend in North Yorkshire. It’s now safely installed in the well deck in its own little cupboard with a big hefty chain and padlock securing it to the boat. So far it’s started on the key, so it looks like it’s staying. While all this has been going on we’ve been charging our batteries with a 1kw two-stroke gennie that Wiltz was good enough to lend us. It sounds like a Lambretta when it fires up and it’s a bit on the noisy side, but it has been a blessing this last two weeks and has meant we’ve not had to run the engine on tick-over, which does it no good whatsoever and takes about an hour of hard graft to it to recover and stop smoking.

The aforementioned party took place in a big old farmhouse near Aysgarth falls called The Rookery  At any time over the four days there were between eight and thirteen of us in residence with no phone signal, no wi-fi, no post and just a mountain of food and drink to keep us company. We had to indulge in the almost forgotten art of entertaining ourselves and it was lovely.

Thank you, dear friends, for inviting us; it will be fondly remembered for many years.

When we got back our fourteen days were up so went up the Johnson Hillock locks,

had one night between the top two, one night on the 48hr moorings outside the Top Lock pub, then moved up to a quiet little spot at Whin’s Bridge.

Nearest post code is PR6 8HN Click here, then zoom out. (We're where the footpath crosses the cut, not where the "A" is.)