Hello and welcome back to my Blog 😊.

Today myself and Angela enjoyed a 5-mile walk along the Shropshire Union Canal followed by a visit to the National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port. It was dark when we set off from the house to drive to Tiverton, but the sun was just rising as we parked up in a lay-by close to the canal.

The towpath was grass/mud and quite uneven in places. We strolled along looking at the bird life – there was the usual Heron fishing and plenty of Mallard Ducks. The canal could obviously take boats larger than the current narrow boats – it was wide and the locks/bridges were sized for much larger boats.

We visited a lock called the Beeston Iron Lock and another called the Beeston Stone Lock. The former was lined with steel sheets and the latter had large stone blocks instead of brick. So,quite unusual locks.

It was great to have a sunny morning after the totally gloomy recent weather.

We walked past a section of canal where a temporary (permanent?) repair to a breached bank had been carried out using sand bags.

We found a café and decided to get a coffee – our timing was off because two large families had just beaten us to order and it would be a long wait we were told. We decided to press on and go to the Canal Museum at Ellesmere Port.

We had visited the museum in February when unfortunately it was cold and raining. So it was nice to be able to walk around today and get a better look at things in the sunshine 😊.

We were particularly keen to visit the Island Warehouse exhibition which houses many artifacts including complete boats.

I was interested to see the ice-breaking boat which was used to break the ice in the canal during particularly cold spells. The museum is first class and does a great job in preserving canal heritage.

We made our usual coffee stop in the excellent café and headed home after a thoroughly enjoyable day out.

Happy Walking! 😊🚶‍♂️