{The GVRAT update is at the bottom of this Canal Furniture post.}
Work From Home today involves catching up on the Virtual ASMS Conference and attending a group meeting online. The weather sucked this morning but was only going to be worse after work so I headed out as soon as breakfast finished and caught the tram up to Bilston to pick up the Birthday canal run a little beyond where it diverged from the mainline.
The Anchor Bridge, the first canal related item of interest (although I was still sniggering at the Glory Hole Monument in Bilston), came immediately after the transition from the side canal to the mainline. I stopped to pee here and read the towpath closure notice while relieving myself:
Assuming this didn’t apply to me, I ran down a ways and then returned to find my way, overland, to the Hills Bridge — the crossing for Biddings Lane — once I discovered that this was, indeed, still an active closure.
Still overland, I was able to rejoin the canal via a neighbourhood park on the south side of the closed section.
The Deepfields Footbridge, above, was next, and another nicer one appeared near the hill on which Coseley sits.
The canal drills through this hill at this point:
The walls are old and porous and drip constantly, sustaining algae and moss:
I brought a torch even though this is a fairly short tunnel of only a few hundred meters. The path is slick and uneven and I recommend a torch for you as well. Here is the south side:
The houses along the hill above the canal on this section benefit from landings that are serving as picnic and party sites:
Then there is another footbridge:
And, the massive, so-called Wallbrook Bridge:
The last item from this now-no-longer-new section of water is what appears to be a derelict canal boat service station on the edge of some rubble that appears to be from a massive factory.
The day’s mileage went longer than planned and results in me now, in the GVRAT, sitting in Chattanooga:
The virtual path went under The Incline and past the baseball stadium but missed the Pickel Barrel altogether.
Needing a dry shirt after the run, I just grabbed the nearest hoodie which coincidentally was a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga garment. I’ve tried to explain “MOCS” to Brits, but most of them assume (fairly enough) that I’m just making this up. Mocs is short for Moccasins, but not the Native American footwear nor even the highly venomous water snake also known as a cottonmouth.
If you look on the map you can probably find Moccassin Bend on the far side of the Tennessee River. There lies the State of Tennessee Mental Hospital. The UTC mascot is a composite of former residents known locally as “Mocs,” which is slightly kinder than madmen or lunatics. (reference required)
I wound up the day next to a television station halfway to Missionary Ridge. At least, virtually so.
Endless British Pub Crawl (Part 3) 