Monday, 6 April 2009

Back from Market Harborough on the canal


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Well not quite Market Harborough but almost. I began at MacDonalds with a cup of coffee, then went south to the canal. It was a lovely warm day, the first this year on which wearing just a tee shirt felt right.

I met folk who live on the water, fed a duck, bumped into a friend Sue while enjoying a break at Foxton Locks and then left the tourists for a very quiet walk up the Leicester Branch.

In the Black Country, where I'm from, the canals are bold in the way that they slice through the landscape. In fact, the industrialisation largely grew from the transportation links that the canals had established. It looked like the canals defined the place with straight line 'cuts', and the factories and houses adapted to them.

But the Leicester Branch of the Grand Union twists and turns, all on a level, in seemingly purposeless loops and bends. I really couldn't see why some stretches were so convoluted and imagined that it might be because a landowner insisted on a price too high for his field, which was circumnavigated as a result.

It made for an interesting walk, which took much longer than if I followed the roads.

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