Wandering Around Wigan

Thursday proved to be a busy day, as I then walked into Leigh and collected the parcel we had previously decided to abandon. The collection point turned out to be open now and found the package easily enough. I walked around parts of Leigh I hadn't really seen before. There was a small shopping precinct with the Leigh Market beside it. This was an indoor market and in a lot of places these seem to be dying out. We often find them with half the stalls empty and a rather desperate sense of a once vibrant heart of the community clinging on for the sake of it. Here in Leigh, however, the hall was bustling and full of life, with all the stalls seemingly let and most of them open for all kinds of fresh meat, vegetables, cheese, fish, as well as clothes, tools, watch menders and the rest and a very busy greasy spoon café. One thing I did notice was the number of stalls selling pies. Almost every food stall seemed to have pies added to its inventory, usually from one of a couple of fiercely competitive local piemakers and sometimes rather incongruously, such as on the fresh fish stall. I suspect Leigh's contribution to the obesity crisis is above the national average!

Arriving back at the boat for the news of a much longer than anticipated delay and working out what to do about it saw off the evening, which brought with it half an hour or so of kids on motor cycles riding up and down the towpath. It was hot and increasingly humid, which may be what brought them out where we had had no such trouble previously. Eventually they disappeared and thankfully it didn't turn into a regular thing each evening.

Where we can go (in blue)

The map shows, in blue, the range we now had available over around five weeks. Clearly, we had time on our hands and didn't need to rush about, so we stayed put at Pennington Flash for a few days over the weekend.

The weather had been hot and sunny for a while and now it began to get a bit more humid and even overcast on Saturday.

I looked at the map and saw that the area the other side of Plank Lane, to the north, looked a lot like the area around the Flash, so I took Archie over there for a walk. It soon became obvious how much investment had gone into reclaiming the area around Pennington Flash and turning it into a Country Park. Here, on the other side of the village, it was a bleak post-industrial moonscape.

The Pennington Flash Alternative

Many of the paths that were supposed to be there could not be identified and I was struck by the sheer mass of vehicle parts that were scattered all over the area, from electrical components to body parts, chassis members to engine blocks, it looked as if a breakers yard had been blown up.

A Warning For All Land Rover Discovery Owners to "Drive Within Their Capabilities"

We finally lost our route altogether and Archie ended up running about in a fetid bog while we tried to find a way out and back to civilisation.

The next day we tried another route, leaving the canal at Gerard's Bridge, where we had moored on the way down, to try and loop around inland. We met much the same issues. The paths would start out as expected and then quickly fade out of existence. All waymarks would vanish and as you followed a clearly defined path you would arrive at a field boundary and find the ground beyond was completely overgrown with impenetrable brambles and nettles. On occasion we could even see where we wanted to get to but there would be just no way through. In the end we beat a frustrated retreat to follow a road back into Plank Lane.

We did some small jobs around the boat on Friday and Saturday and that night the weather broke with a thunderstorm at two in the morning, followed by prolonged heavy rain, prompting a mad, confused scramble to get the bedroom portholes back in. Sunday the eighteenth of June was Waterloo Day, of course. Grey & overcast from the start with a light wind and much cooler air. We did a circuit of the Flash while the rain held off and then I set about an engine service that was rather overdue. It took a lot longer than any professional engineer could afford, of course but in the end the job got done with no significant issues found and no disasters or major spillages in the process, a positive triumph! It had stayed grey all day but in the late afternoon the rain started again. Heavy, persistent, sometimes with thunder and lightning, right through the evening up to midnight.

We had to move on Monday, just to get to some services. We made a daring, unlicensed, excursion onto the Bridgewater, to wind the boat further down and come back to the service block at Butts Bridge. There was little likelihood of being challenged, particularly as the heavens opened on the journey and we spent most of the trip in torrential rain. Having made it to the facilities we stayed put until the weather cleared a bit before heading back up, once again, to moor up on the CRT side in Leigh.

The sun returned later in the afternoon after another trip into Leigh. At the end of the week we had ordered some items to collect there, where we previously hadn't thought we would have time. One was from Screwfix who, for some reason, have their site a long way out and on the opposite side of the canal to everyone else. The walk there was through a council estate and then out to the industrial parks, a whole new part of Leigh, although certainly not a more attractive part. Coming back, I took a different route that showed the path following the bank of Pennington Brook. The path was there, if a bit overgrown, leading eventually into the back streets of Leigh. It didn't seem that anyone really used this path and no effort had been made to make anything of it but with thousands of people living right next to it, you would have thought it might have been quite a popular route.

There was more heavy rain overnight and heavy, persistent rain started again at seven o'clock. From that grey, wet, miserable start it continued long and hard until one o'clock when it more or less stopped but stayed grey and gloomy. We had another round of shopping to do and as we left the supermarket, the rain was threatening again so, this time, we called a cab. It had arrived almost before I had hung up the phone, whisked us back to the bridge and cost less than a fiver, so full marks to Leigh's taxi services. Finally, about four-thirty, the sun came out and things dried out for a while.

On Wednesday, twenty-first of June, the longest day, we returned to Pennington Flash to find our favourite spot was free and the rest of the boats there pretty much the same group as before. Listening to the birds singing down by the lake, in the last of the daylight at ten-thirty in the evening, it was a bit of a shock to think the nights would now be drawing in.

Summer Solstice At Pennington Flash

We stayed here until the weekend while we caught up with some of the maintenance, enjoyed walks around the nature reserve and talked to some of our neighbours.

It is always interesting to hear the different ways that people manage their time on the water. We had quite a long chat with Tina from "Itchy Feet". English but living in America, she spends four months over winter in the States, while her partner, Andy, lives on the boat in a marina. The other eight months of the year, she comes to the UK and they tour the canals together. When I asked why she didn't just move back to England she became rather thoughtful, as if she hadn't really confronted that idea before. She has grown up children over there but would not see them any less if she lived here and paid visits to the States.

Summer seemed to have returned at this point, although it was rather less settled and generally cooler and fresher than the previous week. By Friday we were very low on water but the day started quite dull so we twice took a couple of water containers down to the tap at Plank Lane bridge to fetch back forty litres at a time. With a large festival trolley it wasn't that difficult but not an ideal way to fill the tank.

Saturday was a bright morning but humid and by nine o'clock the ice cream and coffee boat, back in place once more, was doing a roaring trade. We finally left shortly after noon, heading for moorings at the old, abandoned Dover Locks, beside which is a once busy pub, now a burnt out shell having been left empty for a while and succumbing to arson at least twice. "White Bear" pulled away a few yards ahead and just as we would need to stop at the water point to fill up properly, naturally enough, so would he. Just leaving, having finished their own fill was "The Duchess" and we had time to exchange greetings in passing. "White Bear" had a big tank and we waited nearly an hour for our shot, before heading off to arrive at Dover Locks and moor just behind him. After a hot, humid afternoon the air cleared for a really nice evening, perfect to get the barbecue out again.

That night Archie, who normally sleeps through until everyone else has got up, asked to go out three times during the small wee hours and clearly had an upset tummy. We tried setting out for a walk next morning but we didn't get more than a few hundred yards before Archie lay down and refused to go any further. In the end, Sue picked him up and carried him back to the boat, while I carried on with the walk.

To one side of the canal here there is a lot of marsh and open farmland. A road crosses the canal just behind the old locks and starts to climb from the small settlement of Dover up a single long hill, past the Post Office, to the church at the top which is the centre of Abram.

Abram's Impressive Church

My route looped out from Dover and circled round to the high ground called Abram's Brow to come back into Abram from the north. At the top here the town does spread out a little but one long road runs along to the church and then turns steeply downhill to the canal. Both sides of this road are lined with terraced houses, as must have been the case in the coal mining heyday.

Abrams Traditional Terraced Street

However, stretches of this terraced street consists of very recently built properties, which seem to have been designed to look similar to the properties they have replaced.

Modern Houses Built along the same long Street

Abram is a dormitory town now, still thriving because of its position between Leigh, Wigan, Warrington and Manchester but with not much to commend it in terms of appearance or points of interest. One thing I did find, opposite the church, was a monument to John Elisha Grimshaw, born in Abram and awarded a Victoria Cross for his part in the landing at Gallipoli with First Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers in nineteen-fifteen.

One Of The 'Six Before Breakfast' at Gallipoli

The battalion lost nearly six hundred of the thousand men who landed but the bravery shown by Grimshaw and his comrades won them six Victoria Crosses in all, which became known as the 'six VC's before breakfast'.