Old West River. River Great Ouse. Aldreth to Godmanchester.

Hermatage Lock at Earith is one of the two manned locks on the Ouse, the other being at Denver. This is because both are tidal. ‘Surely,’ we hear you cry, ‘the lock at Denver marks the join between the river and the sea. How can it be that there is another tidal lock half way to Bedford?’ Well, it’s because there is a 20 mile short cut that runs in a straight line along the New Bedford River from Earith to Denver bypassing Ely and all the twists and turns of the Ouse.

The entrance to this is just above Hermatage lock...

making the short section between there and the next lock tidal, although the rise and fall so far inland is barely noticeable.

A short distance upstream is the sluice which forms the beginning of the Old Bedford River.

This was part of our old friend Cornelius Vermuyden’s grand plan; flood water from further up the catchment area was quickly drained out to sea without having the opportunity to spread out across the low lying fens. The New Bedford is navigable; you go the full length of it in one go with the tide. If you’re in a hurry it can take days off the journey and save quite a bit of diesel in the process.

What had excited us most about this section was the fact that there were reports of seals being spotted on the riverbank and we hoped to be lucky enough to see one.

As it turned out we reckon you’d have to be very unlucky not to. We moored up on the EA mooring outside Westview Marina and spent the day on seal lookout but didn’t see the mother and baby who were basking within yards of the boat until we went out for a walk.

When we came back they’d gone from their sandy beach and we thought we’d seen the last of them, but as we walked along the pontoon by the boat they swam out from underneath it!

In the morning Ann-Marie was woken up by a seal clearing its nostrils right outside the hatch...

A photo of where a seal was just now. 

...then on our way to Brownshill Lock we saw another one dozing on another sunny bit of river bank.

Flipping things are all over the place. (See what we did there? Flipping? Seal? Geddit? This stuff is priceless!)

We pulled into one of the three GOBA moorings just upstream from the Pike & Eel.

There’s a little pathway from there into the marina, which meant we could walk back up the Ouse Valley Way to Earith for the car on the first day..

Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough!

...and cycle into St Ives for a few essential supplies on the second. We came home with the paniers bulging with two dozen yellow labelled pears!

The following morning some contractors came along and strimmed the bank round the boat. We didn’t realize until we went to set off that they’d disturbed a wasp’s nest right behind us. Dave reversed Legend on the rear pin to bring the front out from the bank, then got off to pull the pin out. By this time the wasps had been strimmed, smoked and shaken, and they’d had enough. Dave got stung a couple of times behind his knee. It was very painful and he looked a bit unwell for a while, but the sun came out, and as we passed Holywell with it's lovely village green and public mooring, and he started to feel better.

By the time we come back the local council will have finished repairing these moorings.

As we were going into St Ives lock we met a man in a tupperware boat. He only had one wife. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and he looked as if he’d eaten all the other six wives, and their cats. The remaining wife was more hindrance than help and between them they made a complete hash of getting into the lock with us, after which she refused to make eye contact, or even acknowledge our existence, so we won’t be writing any poems about them.

We idled all the way through St Ives looking for somewhere to moor, then turned round, went back to the beginning and pulled up on Town Quay.

It felt a bit odd to be moored there as the quayside was level with the boat roof, as were the benches all along it. We spent a strange afternoon chatting to the people of St Ives and those on holiday, all the while looking up and shading our eyes. By tea time we both had neck ache. In the evening we watched the sun set over the very impressive bridge...

...and went to sleep listening to a not-too-shabby covers band in the local pub.

We had two days in St Ives, although due to the dull weather, apart from a quick dash to the market and the library, the second one was mostly spent inside doing crafty hobbies.

Dave's prototype tiller tassels.

We moved the car to Godmanchester, (pronounced God-man-chest-er. Surprisingly) via Tesco, then cycled back with most of the shopping. We couldn’t fit it all in the panniers, due to an unexpected haul of unusual fish, so all the non-perishables remained in the car boot. On the way back we came across two heavily overloaded plum trees and our first blackberries of the year, which cheered us up no end, but made cycling somewhat challenging.

Back at the boat it was becoming rather windy. If we’d been on a canal we’d have stayed put in such conditions, but river folk are made of sterner stuff! Off we went to Hemingford. The very pretty public wharf was just at the right height to get our gunnels wedged underneath, so after faffing about with various fender options for half an hour we moved up to join the cows and the ancient willow trees on the GOBA moorings in the next field.

In the evening we walked around the beautiful Hemingford Abbots and found some more plums.

At Houghton there is a working mill. It is situated on an island between the main river and the millstream. It’s owned by the National Trust of which we are now fully paid-up card-holding members. Whoo-ooh! Also at Houghton, there is an EA mooring site, it too is situated on an island between the river and the millstream.

How delightful!

It was only when we’d moored up and wandered as far as we could in either direction that we realised that the mooring and the mill were not on the same island. Not only that, but the only way off our island was by boat.

We briefly considered blowing up the dinghy and paddling across, but then it occurred to us that if our dinghy got nicked while we were looking round the mill we wouldn’t be able to get back to our boat. And by the time we’d got it out and inflated it the mill, or more importantly the tea-rooms, would have been shut. So we put it off till the following day.

The following day we were moored in Huntingdon on the Rotary Club moorings.

We cycled back to Houghton Mill, passing some fantastic cherry trees...

...only to discover that it was shut. We will persevere. On our way back down stream we’ll have another go. Although we quite expect to find it cordoned off due to the plague.

On our second evening in Huntingdon, after it had been raining for most of the day, Anne dropped in on her way past for tea. It’s always lovely to see her and catch up on her news.

Nasty experiences are few and far between on the water, but occasionally they do happen. That night one of them did. At about 3am we were woken by a loud bang, followed by running footsteps. We looked out to see 6 lads running away from the boats. There was another bang as something was thrown at the side of the boat so we phoned the police. By the time we’d got a crime number and given a very vague description, (“Six lads...late teens...early 20s...sorry, it was dark.”) they’d run off. We went outside to check for damage. Apart from two muddy splat marks...

...everything appeared to be ok, all the roof-tat and the flowers were still in place but the boat in front of us had had its mooring lines let off and they were busy tying it back up again. The fella said it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence around these parts. We think they’d tried to do the same to ours, but because of the way we tie up they couldn’t, so they’d chucked mud at us instead. We were cheered by the thought that not only were the young men in question soaked from roaming the streets in the early hours in the rain, they were now also muddy. Hopefully they’ll get pneumonia.

First thing in the morning we got the Hell out of Dodge. Under the Town Bridge then under the big A14 viaduct.

It’s a shame because Huntingdon isn’t a bad place, it was one little incident and no real harm was done. But we know we won’t even consider stopping there on the way back.

Godmanchester however, despite only being separated from Huntingdon by the ever present elevated A14, was a completely different kettle of fish. We moored on the dead-end arm between the lock and the Chinese Bridge at the side of the park. It was a lovely place to be with a constant stream of people walking by, all very complimentary and chatty. Just in front of us was the landing stage for a little ferryboat that did very reasonable trips up and down the river and the park was full of people having picnics and enjoying the sunshine.

After transferring the rest of the shopping into the boat we moved the car to Offord and walked back along the Ouse Valley Way, stopping briefly at the golf course for a spot of cherry scrumping.

That night there were more bangs outside the boat, however this time they were some rather spectacular fireworks from the other side of the park. Godmanchester is somewhere we will be stopping on the way back.

River Great Ouse. Old West River. Ely to Aldreth Drain.

A Teasel on the river bank near Aldreth.

Our one goal and the only fixed point on our calendar for this year has been to have Legend in Ely for the weekend of the Ely Folk Festival. Over the past 6 or 7 years we’ve been to this lovely event by car and camped and it has become a firm favourite. It coincides with our wedding anniversary and we’ve promised ourselves that if we only do one music festival a year, Ely will be that one.

All the official EA, GOBA and council moorings on the Great Ouse have a 48hr limit, so we had to up sticks and clear off for a week. We didn’t go far though,...

...Little Thetford had plenty of space and we could get the car right to the other side of the flood bank by going over a self-operated level crossing.

Terribly Exciting!

During the week Diane came over for a visit and we went for a cruise down the river to Ely where we had a walk round the city and lunch at the Tea For Two café before coming back.

We also went back to Anglesey Abbey to see the bits we’d missed on our first visit and to buy some more of their stone-ground wholemeal flour, which we think we’re now addicted to.

On Thursday afternoon we lost count of the number of boats passing us on their way downstream, so we were quite apprehensive about finding somewhere to stop when we set off on Friday morning. As it turned out we were fine. We accosted the crew of the first boat we passed on the Ely moorings and they were happy for us to breast up with them on the way back if we couldn’t find anywhere else. Which, in short, is what happened. However about an hour later someone pulled out behind us so we backed up and slotted in there. When we’re in places where mooring spots are at a premium we put a “Welcome. Moor Alongside” notice in the window, so it was no surprise, when we got back from shopping, to find another boat on the outside of us. We had a quick chat with them and discovered that they had a permanent mooring about five miles away at the Lazy Otter and had brought the boat into Ely to go use as a base while they were at the folk festival.

The festival, as usual, was brilliant! On the Friday night we watched the Demon Barbers and Threepenny Bit, after which we went to Marquee 2 for a manic midnight ceilidh. Whilst our fellow revellers crawled back to their little tents and caravans we strolled through a sleeping city down to the riverbank and crept on board our beautiful boat, where we sat on the bed and stuffed ourselves with ham rolls at 3am. We hadn’t noticed our neighbours at the festival site; in the morning we found out they hadn’t gone up there as ‘that sort of music wasn’t their kind of thing’. When you’re breasted up, any movement or noise goes straight into the other boat, so we apologised for being so late home, but they said they’d not heard us come back and we hadn’t woken them up.

On Saturday we immersed ourselves in the folk music and dancing that took over the town. First we caught up with Bourne Borderers, the side we both used to dance with, outside the Maltings.

They’re such lovely people and we got lots of green face-paint hugs. Then went into the city and watched the morris parade...

 before going to find Pig Dyke Molly; Ann-Marie’s old side, who’s first dance spot was just down from the chippy.

 So that was lunch sorted then. We caught the festival shuttle bus to the site just in time to catch Les Barker, our favourite poet take his turn on stage...

 then went back to Legend for a sit down. In the evening Mike joined us and we mostly sat outside the main marquee on a picnic blanket.

Later on a little gang of our folky mates joined us and we spent the evening chatting and listening to the music. We had a slightly earlier night than the previous one and were home with a hot chocolate at half eleven.

At just after midnight Legend was set rocking as our neighbours came home and trotted across our back deck. There is a way of crossing boats without setting up a pendulum action; you step as far into the middle as you can reach, wait a fraction of a second while the boat recovers, then step onto the next one. Our neighbours clearly didn’t know this. One by one, with uncannily perfect timing all four of them went from one side of our boat to the other. By the time the last one had got off, we’d nearly fallen out of bed. Luckily, nothing crashed out of cupboards or fell of the sides, so we just chuckled to ourselves and went back to sleep…..Nearly.

10 minutes later they obviously discovered certain facts. Facts that are well known to, and form an integral part of the lives of, continuous cruisers and others who live off grid for long periods.

A.  Batteries do not have an infinite lifespan.

B.  Hot water doesn’t stay hot forever.

C.  Cruising for five miles 36 hours ago will not change A or B.

Upon discovering the above to be true and, quite probably, after a session in the beer tent which had numbed any sense of appropriate behaviour, they started their engine. We looked at each other in disbelief, then Dave opened our side hatch and hammered on their boat. When a head appeared Dave pointed at it and shouted ‘NO! Not at midnight! That is bang out of order!’ The head muttered ‘Sorry, I didn’t know you were in.’ and disappeared. The engine was promptly silenced and we assume they went to bed dirty and in the dark.
Where on earth they thought we’d be in Ely at half past midnight is beyond us, but more to the point, we were surrounded by other boats in a City centre. There is a well-recognised protocol of quiet after 8pm. No engines, no generators, no loud music.
Maybe if you only go 5 miles once a year nobody tells you these things. Well they certainly can’t use that excuse anymore.

In the morning we went back up to the site for a Witchmen Morris workshop, which we pretty much managed to get right and thoroughly enjoyed, and by the time we got back our neighbours had scuttled off back to the Lazy Otter.

From Ely we went up the Ouse once again to Pope’s Corner, turned onto the Old West and stopped at Goldmere. We had promised to help Mike with an oil change, but he got held up at work, so we’ll pop in on the way back and do it then.

Tuesday was our wedding anniversary. We had a beautiful boating day up the Old West to the Lazy Otter surrounded by riverside wildlife, after which we watched our wedding DVD. Ahhh. Lovely.

We did a car move to Earith the next day and walked back along the flood bank to the Otter. That didn’t go quite as well as we’d hoped. As the day wore on the weather got hotter and hotter and the nettles and thistles got higher and higher. The old adage that ‘the existence of a right of way does not guarantee the existence of a path’ popped up and bit us just after the Twenty Pence bridge, when both sides of the river seemed completely impenetrable. We finally got back to the boat, scratched, stung, knackered and hungry, where we wolfed down a very late lunch and set off up the river.

As a kind of compensation, Karma gave us some lovely baby grebes and ponies to look at...

and Ann-Marie found a pet calf.

Back at Twenty Pence bridge, strategically placed to take our minds off the giant blood-thirsty thistles, there was a grass snake swimming in the water. Well we assume it was swimming, but it might just as well have been drowning after falling in.

We didn’t get all the way to Earith that evening; there was a very tempting GOBA mooring at Aldreth where we stopped and spent the evening in the well deck watching the sun go down while rubbing Savlon on our ravaged shins.

River Great Ouse. River Cam. Upware to Ely via Cambridge.

First thing in the morning, outside the Five Miles From Anywhere, we awoke to find we had a visitor.

This is a Whooper Swan. They have a reputation for being aggressive, but it really is unjustified....

they’re just bolder and more inquisitive than the more common Mute Swans.

We had a couple of days back at Fidwell Fen and walked out along the droves and riverbanks under the huge fen skies. On one walk we were lucky enough to see a pair of Avocets wheeling around over one of the meres.

Very exciting! These are incredibly rare and at one time were officially extinct in Britain.

On our way to our next stop at Bottisham Lock we saw the Avocets again, plus a Heron and a couple of Kingfishers. At the lock we met Joan on Early Byrd...

who we’d seen briefly at Wicken Fen. She lives nearby and goes down the Cam and up Wicken Lode every week on her days off.  We stopped on the GOBA moorings just above the lock...

they’re a bit of a jungle but very peaceful. 

We were getting ready to go back for the car when we found that we didn’t have the car keys. This has always been one of our worst nightmares, if they’d fallen out of a pocket on one of our walks or dropped in the canal they’d be gone for good.  Luckily we have a spare, but when we got back to the car-park the car was unlocked, leading us to the conclusion that we’d left the keys in the door and someone had handed them in somewhere. It seemed too much of a coincidence that we would have left it unlocked and lost the keys on the same day. We phoned the nearby pub and the police, all to no avail and a week later, when Dave found them in the pocket of a jacket, it just went to show that coincidences are just that, and not impossibilities.

While we were moored at Bottisham we went off for a day working in Leicester. Our patch was quite near to Castle Gardens so on a break we went to have a look at the visitor moorings.

Leicester has got a bit of a reputation, but it looked alright to us. In a couple of years when we finally get there, we'll do what we usually do and trust our judgment; it's worked ok so far. Mostly. 

The following day we treated ourselves to a Grand Day Out in London. We were up at the crack of dawn and had our porridge on the back while boating to the visitor moorings at Clayhithe.

From there it was a quick walk to Waterbeach station where we hopped on a train and were in King’s Cross for 10 o’clock.

We had nowhere near enough time in the science museum...

Spot the 2CV 

Dave standing next to the Rolls Royce RB211 engine that his dad drew.

then lunch in Borough market, followed by a very interesting walk over Tower Bridge and through the city to the Regents Canal at St Pancras.

From there we walked along the towpath to Camden Lock where we bimbled through the Horse Tunnels until they closed. We got the tube back to King’s Cross where we hopped on the train home just before it pulled out. Perfect timing!

As we were now National Trust members it seemed a good idea to find other places to visit, so the next day we found ourselves in Anglesey Abbey – which is neither in Anglesey (It’s in Cambridgeshire.) or an Abbey (It’s a replica stately home, built on the site of, and including large portions of, a former priory.)

As well as the house and extensive gardens there’s a working water driven flour mill...

a fen with lots of explorable places, a very posh looking restaurant and a lovely little ice-cream trolley in the grounds.

 And the sun shone, and there were deck chairs.

We didn’t have time to see half of it and vowed - as we now get in for free - to go back another time.

Before we ventured into Cambridge itself we had a recce with the bikes to the limit of navigation at Jesus Lock. While we were there we bumped into Joan again – almost literally – who very kindly pointed out the visitor mooring sites in the city. It was going to be a bit of a gamble finding somewhere to stop that weekend as there was a huge fairground on Midsummer Common and all the permanent boats had understandably evacuated from there, and taken refuge elsewhere for a few days. (Elsewhere included the visitor moorings.) In we went anyway, through the very pretty Bates Bite Lock...

And onward upstream into the city.

We stopped for water outside the lido and had a good look at the opposite bank just below the lock. It seemed to us that there might be just enough room between the last boat and the ‘Thou shalt not moor beyond here’ sign so, hoping that it was deep enough, we pushed over to the far side.

Spot on. Lovely mooring, right by the footbridge over Jesus lock.

We downloaded ‘i-footpath’ onto Ann-Marie’s phone and followed an easy 2 hour tour of Cambridge, including the Backs, the bridges, the Fitzwilliam, the Conduit and lots of other interesting stuff.

In the evening we went to meet up with Anne who, by happy coincidence, just happened to be working in Cambridge the following day. We retraced most of our walk with her, then she treated us to dinner in the city. Fabulous!

The next day we visited the Fitzwilliam Museum which holds some very impressive collections of Greek, Roman and Egyptian tombs, pots, sculpture and artefacts, as well as hundreds of paintings, all within a magnificent building.

One of the few surviving Lidos from the 1920’s lies between the River Cam and Jesus Green. On such a blisteringly hot afternoon it was an opportunity too good to miss. We paid our £4 and pushed through the turnstile under the sign telling us that the water temperature was 24˚C. Upon entering the water we discovered that this was clearly not the case. However, after a few minutes hopping up and down, whilst making breathless squeaky noises, we conceded that our initial impression – minus 5 – had perhaps been a tad hasty and, once you got used to it and the circulation returned to your extremities, it wasn’t too bad.

Anne joined us after she finished for the day; how we laughed while she hopped up and down and squeaked. Later the three of us lay on our towels, soaking up the late afternoon sun and watching the wind in the poplar trees, surrounded by the many facets of semi-naked Cambridge.

There followed a steaming hot day boating back to Bottisham, a day working in a wind tunnel in Birmingham (the less said about that the better), then a day of manoeuvres which included the deployment of all our various transport methods. By teatime, the car was in a car-park in Ely, whilst the boat, the bikes, the shopping and ourselves were back on the lovely visitor moorings at Upware.

We also managed – as the following day was the fourth of July - to produce some Stars and Stripes bunting for our windows. (We had tried to find some in the shops but for some reason there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm to sell souvenirs of us getting our backsides kicked out of America.)

We think our home made efforts were far superior to anything we could have bought anyway.

Next morning, bright and early we put the bunting on the roof and in the windows and set off once more through Upware lock and up to Popes Corner. This time we turned right up the section of the Great Ouse known as the Old West River.

Many years ago, before the course of the Ouse was altered and it still flowed out to sea at Wisbech, this bit of river used to go the other way. Nowadays - although it theoretically flows west to east - it actually doesn’t go anywhere very much, due to most of the water on the Ouse flowing down the New Bedford River from Earith straight to King’s Lynn. This makes the Old West rather narrow and shallow, but quite pretty for all that. 

A few boat lengths along we tied up alongside Nb Shanti, owned by Mike, our American friend. He had a visitor – Nicole - over from California for a week or so and we’d arranged to have a joint 4^th of July cruise up the river to The Lazy Otter. Hence the bunting. We don’t just throw this together you know.

Our little flotilla set off, avoiding the canoes and weedy patches to arrive at the GOBA moorings just before the pub a couple of hours later. We were lucky enough to slot into the only gap left, and Mike and Nicole tied Shanti up alongside us.

There followed a delicious lunch outside the pub.Later on, after a relaxing afternoon which may or may not have included napping, we combined our wares aboard Shanti. Mike’s contribution, an amazing chilled yoghurt and garlic soup, stole the show and all in all it was a terrific day.

In the morning we were treated to freshly brewed Californian Coffee, before our neighbours set off for St Ives. While Dave swapped the USA bunting for the Birthday Banners Ann-Marie put the finishing touches to a batch of sausage rolls and a strawberry & cream cake, so that by the time Lindsay, Paul and Happy Jack arrived we were ready for Paul’s birthday cruise down to Ely for the Ely Aquafest.

You could be forgiven for thinking that there’s some kind of plan to all this.

As if to prove that there really isn’t, we arrived in Ely just as the raft race was in its final stages. Festooned with vegetation and bunting, and about as far from ‘low profile’ as you can get, we came chugging down the river to the bend outside The Cutter, only to realise – too late – that that was where the finish line was. A buoy had been placed in the middle of the channel to mark the spot, but we didn’t see that; we were too busy wondering why there was a huge Gin Palace hovering in mid-stream. It was only as we passed it that we noticed that most of the passengers were very smartly dressed and wearing copious amounts of gold chains. We also noticed the bright orange raft coming towards us. Dave did a very hasty reverse and many, many times more by luck than judgment managed to not hit either the Mayoral Yacht, or the crew of the barely afloat HMS Sainsbury, or anything else as Legend backed out of the way. Not surprisingly, due to the frantic nature of the occasion, we don't have any photos, but we have no doubt that the many spectators lining the bank have hundreds.

After all the commotion had calmed down, we poured some more tea, handed the cake around again, and continued along Ely’s lovely river front where, quite unexpectedly, we found somewhere to moor. We thought we’d have to go straight through to Queen Adelaide and walk back, but we found another narrowboat to tie up to till the raft-race crews left the park moorings and then moved down to there. By six o’clock - and with impressive speed - the fair had vacated the site, and we had sat down to another perfect Ann-Marie creation – spicy red and green Thai – before saying a fond farewell to our fab friends.

It was lovely having you aboard Paul & Lindsay.

Happy Birthday Mate.