Tuesday 3 August 2010

Hazelhurst Junction To Froghall, 8 Locks And 1 Tunnel.




A bit of caving with Ubique then onto what seems to be the biggest waste of money we have seen.









Off we go to Froghall and probably the lowest tunnel on the waterways. That sign is still pointing to Uttoxeter at twenty miles away but the canal terminates at Froghall nowadays.







Having to join the River Churnet for some of the journey this sign made strict reading. River extremely dangerous when in flood, it gravely warns.
Why then are there no such warning boards or gauges from the other end of the river?







Here's the gauge board, there is an awful lot of red above an inch or so of green. The water was well below the green and into the brown.......... Oh hang on that was mud.





Dropping the last lock back onto the canal there is this High Tec profile gauge of the forthcoming tunnel, I went through as accurately as I could but we hit it all over the place, no tunnel for us then......... Or so it seemed.






Not being one to pay too much attention to things of this nature I thought we could just nose Ubique in and see what happens. If we touch I can just reverse out anyway.






It was tight in there, very very tight but we hadn't come here to turn back so we pressed on through. With me on my knees steering and D in the bows keeping us on track we made it through with all paint intact and emerged to a crowd of people on the towpath watching us. Where do they come from?







I'm not too sure what the biggest surprise of the day was, finding this lock in pristine condition or the water point next to it.
We just had to see where that lock went.






It dropped into this mooring basin!






Why is this here? Who's idea was this then?
The place is so under used it is choked with weed and suffering badly from the Blue Green Algae.
There cannot ever have been that many boats making the trip through that tunnel to warrant building this basin here.
The profile gauges alone are so hopelessly wrong at the moment they must be deterring a lot of potential visitors.


There are a lot of gates that could have been repaired with the money it must have cost to build this white elephant.




Until next time.................




.

3 comments:

Graham and Jill Findlay said...

Now you know why it is called Froghall, that is exactly what is there, frog all.

Adam said...

As I understand it, most of the money came from a bequest, that specified it could only be spent there.

Chris & Debbie said...

Hi Graham and Jill,

I like that comment, I like that a lot.



Hi Adam,

That would explain it being there then.
It does seem quite a waste though, are there any future plans to open the canal up?