Your jacket has been found & Return to Bumble Hole

Yesterday Jan had a rummage through the freezer in the late afternoon extracting a large quantity of frozen cherries and strawberries.  I assisted by escorting her down to Sainsbury’s this morning where she bought some madeira cake. 

Apparently a trifle is going to be made later today.  What a shame that Jan doesn’t like trifle and we’re not expecting guests!

We waited for most of the showers to pass before departing our mooring.  The interim stop was to be the CRT facilities at Blowers Green.  A couple of hundred metres short of Blowers Green Lock we found some ones missing heavy black waterproof jacket.  I needed to use the new breadknife to extract it.  However the good news it is now suitable for a trip to the Vatican.

There is nothing like stripping off the top half and going down the weed hatch in the rain to put you in a good mood.  There was a “Yellow Peril” moored on the water point above the lock.  The crew had hired the boat from Worcester and had it for a week.  I asked them if they were doing the ring and was told they didn’t have sufficient time.  I did point out they had reached the canal summit and there were roughly the same number of locks in each direction but that seemed to go over their heads.

It took almost an hour to fill the water tank and we used the time to catch up on a few tasks (eg, making trifle).  On our arrival at Bumble Hole we found two moored boats.  We’d seen both of them at Merry Hill. 

After dinner I wandered down to the junction and then decided to follow the route of Netherton Tunnel by walking over the hill.

The feature that first caught my eye was the chimney of Cobbs Engine House.  There is a path leading up to it from the junction.

The area around here was a warren of coal mines and the extracted coal was (of course) transported via the canal.  The pump house was actually used to remove water from the mines. The shaft was 525 feet deep, removing over 1,600,000 litres of water into the canal every day.  The pump house was built around 1831 and was steam driven.  It ceased working in 1928 and the engine now resides in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, USA.  There are a few short canal arms here which are all that remains of what was once a busy canal terminal.

Autumn has obviously arrived.  The leaves are going brown and gold.  They are also drifting into the canal and fouling the propeller!

There isn’t a footpath directly above the alignment of the tunnel which meant I had to zig-zag across the tops of the hills looking for signs.  Eventually I found one airshaft hidden in a small copse.

There were some good views to the west as dusk fell.

Turners Hill was slightly to the east of my position.  At 271 metres it’s the highest feature in the West Midlands.  The two towers on top can be seen for miles.We noticed them whilst moored at Kinver.  Both towers are radio transmitters.  It was my initial error in pointing our TV aerial that led to us not getting a signal.   

Turners Hill 1 is a steel lattice structure whilst Turners Hill 2 has a concrete base.