Kinver

It looks as if the recent heat wave has broken. This morning, it was raining and raining hard. It eased off later, but the rain was with us intermittently until well in to the afternoon. Leaving FARNE, a fellow Braidbar boat, whom we have leapfrogged since leaving Saul, we negotiated the twin double staircase locks at Stourport and Pat went off into town to get a paper. She was back by the time I had dawdled through the basins. There seemed to be a lot of opposite direction traffic building up with COUNT, another Braidbar, and sundry hire boats waiting to go down in the rain. Following PERFIK up the first lock we set off on today’s journey to Kinver. Progress was very slow, as the canal seems very shallow; more so than I remember from our experiences in a hire boat 5 years ago. Much has changed since then: the visitor moorings at Stourport for example. There has also been a lot of development in Kidderminster with a brand new TESCO and many other stores in some kind of massive retail development below the town lock. So it was around 4 pm before we reached Kinver. Our last visit was only our second trip on the canals and this time we were much more appreciative of the beauty of this canal with its sandstone cliffs and the hills on either side of the Stour Valley. At Kinver we visited the workshops of “Wilsons” of Kinver, the original makers, to get some repairs made to our cratch cover. So we will be having a rest day tomorrow waiting for the work to be done. We visited the well-known Vine pub this evening and the restaurant there. The Vine has been in the news recently as there was a plan to demolish it and build houses. One can see why. There is a long and extensive canal frontage which the developers thought would be ideal for houses, however, completely the wrong thing to do. The pub is a landmark and must bring visitors into the village. Thankfully, the villagers blocked the plan and the pub remains, otherwise we would have had yet another sterile waterfront development.

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