Stroudwater Canal

Another day of rain of varying intensity from dawn to early evening, After our usual Saturday pancake breakfast, we drove to Stroud in Gloucestershire to visit Clare's former colleague Jacquie for lunch. It was good to see her happily settled in her new one bedroomed house with its small terrace big enough for the round garden table and four chairs she brought with her from Dinas Powis. It's south facing, looking over  Froom valley woodland just ten minutes from the town centre. The small row of four houses sits alongside the Christian Community Anthroposphical church to which Jacquie belongs. 

Stroud and its environs has many Anthroposophists, contributing to its creative and social life, helping to create an environmentally friendly place with a hip alternative lifestyle, rated by the media as one of the attractive places in Britain to live. Five Cotswold valley streams meet here, so it became a world famous centre for woollen cloth weaving from the seventeenth century onward, thanks to water power, and the canal infrastructure. Those days are long gone and the factories, constructed from brick and Cotswold stone have been repurposed for other enterprises, social purposes or converted into apartments.

After lunch, I went for a walk alongside the canal flowing down the valley to the Severn Estuary, called the Stroudwater Navigation Canal. It was built in the late 18th century in order to link Bristol and London by water. At Wallbridge in the town centre is the junction with the longer stretch of canal through the Cotswolds that meets the Thames further east. From Wallbridge the Navigation runs to Framilode on the Estuary to the west. Boats of a specific length and capacity called Severn Trows went from there to Avonmouth and through the Avon Gorge into the city centre basin. The eight miles of waterway was abandoned in 1954, but is being brought back to life, restored by the Cotswolds Canals Trust. It's interesting that there's a footpath along its southern bank, but it's not a towpath horses could use. The Trows used sails but were hauled through locks manually. I walked eight kilometres in the rain, covering the stretch from Wallbridge to Ryford Double Lock, beautiful experience. My photos are here.

Thankfully, the rain was far lighter on our journey home than it had been in the morning, and there was less traffic. When we returned, I was relieved and pleased to find a package had arrived in the post, small enough to go through the letter box containing the fit-bit straps Clare ordered for me. The order took eight days to arrive from heaven knows where, but was scheduled to take from ten to twenty days to deliver, so I can't complain. Two packages sit in our hallway for neighbours nearby who have been away this week. Has The System figured out we're at home and answering the door more often than others? 

After supper we watched a fascinating Michael Palin travelogue about southern Brazil from a few years back, before the catastrophe of the Bolsenaro presidency. We started watching a French movie on BBC Four with a start studded cast, but gave up on it once we realised it didn't finish until late. Better to get an early night after a hundred and twenty miles of diving in the rain.