Mary Arden

I hate it when the damned keyboard reverses two letters.  It can result in you urining your post.

Whilst taking a local walk yesterday evening around Wilmcote I came upon one of those brown tourist signs pointing to Mary Arden’s house.  I recognised the name.  For the benefit of my Aussie readers Mary Arden is famous for creating a popular line of cosmetics.  Actually I may not be right with that.  Part of me thinks she was one of the Spice Girls and another part thinks she was Rod Stewart’s second wife.  Oh well, Google solved it!   Mary Arden was the mother of William Shakespeare.  She was one of eight children born to a local farmer who was rather affluent.  Mary must have been both intelligent and determined because she was made executor in her father’s will and he also left her 60 acres of prime farmland.  She married John Shakespeare, the son of one of her father’s tenant farmers and they moved into Stratford Upon Avon where William was born.

The National Trust bought Mary Arden’s Farm in 1930.  It was still in good condition and had been in continuous use as a working farm since she lived there as child.  The farm was refurbished by the National Trust as a replica Tudor Farm.  In 2000 it was discovered that Mary Arden’s farmhouse actually belonged to a neighbour, Adam Palmer.  The NT were quite fortunate in that they had also purchased the ‘real’ farm in 1968 without realising it’s true history. 

We paid our entrance fee and went for a walk around the farm buildings.  It’s quite apparent that many of the buildings are dated after Mary’s time.  There is a notice in the farmhouse stating there wouldn’t have been an upper floor in Mary’s time and the kitchen would also have been a subsequent addition. 

The farmhouse

I doubt this is Mary’s bed.  But it is narrow for two!

 

It appears most people slept on the floor

Access points had to fit in around the building frame

Homes of the less wealthy during this period were still constructed around the principle of the great hall.  The basic frame was built around ‘A’ frames.  The photo below shows an ‘A’ frame.

 

The wall panelling between the frames were filled in by weaving wattle branches and then overfilling with daub.  Daub is a mixture of wet earth, clay, straw and animal dung.  A thin layer of whitewash is applied as a water resistant plaster to either side.  Panels filled with bricks were a subsequent technique.

An exposed wattle panel

I thought the NT had a good business model selling small packets of animal food to families so their children could then feed the pigs, ducks, rabbits, etc.  Get the customer pay for the food your livestock need!

A demonstration of geese herding was in progress.

The lady giving the commentary about herding geese explained that whilst they would be demonstrating this technique with approximately 12 geese. When it came to taking the geese to Stratford during the Tudor period there would be 300 to 500.

The dovecote was constructed to provide a large number of roosting spots. 

 

The doves provided eggs, feathers and they also supplemented the diet.  Droppings made good fertilizer.

On our way back to the mooring we noticed the following sign.

I hadn’t realised the Stratford Upon Avon Canal was the first canal to be rescued.  The involvement of the National Trust explains the concrete plaque I noticed inside one of the locks.

 

In the afternoon we completed the Wilmcote Flight (11 locks) mooring just short of the busy A46.

Looking back

Cost cutting, Lock Nigel and the Stripper

We’ve now crossed three aqueducts on the Stratford Upon Avon Canal.  The first was Yarningale Aqueduct.  The original was constructed from wood in 1813 and subsequently washed away in 1832 when there was a breach in the nearby Grand Union Canal.  It was replaced within a month using a cast iron trough.

There is a longer aqueduct at Wootton Wawen.  This one spans the A3400 . It was built by the Stratford Canal Company in 1813 and is a Grade II listed.

Something nags me about the length of this aqueduct.  The roads in 1813 would have been much narrower, so is this the original structure?

The last aqueduct was the longest.  Edstone Aqueduct is 137 metres long making it the longest canal aqueduct in England (remember that really long and high one is in Wales!). 

At one time it was owned by the Great Western Railway, who fitted a pipe onto it and used it to refill the tanks of passing steam trains.  Apparently it also had a pipe running along the base of the trough which was connected to a furnace near the base.  The hot water in the pipe prevented the water in the trough freezing during winter.  

It was around here we first noticed the recent cost cutting measures of the CRT grass cutting contractors.  Apparently their big mowers have been replaced!

I wonder how long it will take to meet the ‘veg pledge’ with a mower this size?   

There was a day boat on the lock mooring above Bearley Lock and the entire crew was looking at the lock scratching their heads.  Jan walked forward to see what the issue was.

Tow of the crew told her “We don’t know this lock!”  So Jan said “I’ll introduce you.  This is Lock Nigel.  Nigel meet the crew of the day boat!”  Damned Antipodean sense of humour.   But we did help them down through the lock.

The last piece of excitement for the day was the towpath stripper.  He saw us as we rounded the bend and promptly threw down his strimmer and tossed away his helmet before dancing down the towpath.  He then turned towards us and stripped of his life jacket, protective vest and shirt whilst frantically waving his arms.  Jan doesn’t mind the odd piece of eye candy and this guy was really bumping and grinding like a Chippendale. Then we cruised through a cloud of angry wasps and realised what he had hit with his strimmer.  No photo because Jan felt sorry for him!

Lovely Canal

A surprise this morning when we awoke to find the domestic battery bank at 50% SOC (state of charge).  Normally it’s 80% and I don’t think we have ever had the batteries this low.  However our heavy traction batteries can go as low as 30%, so we won’t have damaged them. But I did wonder what had caused them to deplete so low.  Did we have something running during the night?  Was there a problem with one of the batteries? Had the recent 240Vshorepower recharging not done a particularly good job?  Or had the charger done a great job and recovered some of our lost capacity and confused the Smartgauge?  I don’t think it’s the latter.  Today I carefully watched the Victron BMV600 monitoring the amps flowing into the batteries.  At the end of our cruise I turned the 12V circuits off and watched the Victron to see if we had an electrical leak (we didn’t).  Looks like I’ll be watching it for much of the evening.

It’s been a lovely cruise today heading south down the Stratford Upon Avon Canal. I went for an evening walk yesterday and took a photo of Lapworth Junction.

Today we passed a number of those lock keeper cottages with their unique barrel shaped rooves.  After seeing so many other bloggers photos it was good to finally see this ourselves.

Jan did some of the steering today and made a better first effort than I did.  Towards the end she even took Waiouru into a few locks.

I happened to notice the wording on this canal side bench seat.

And what about this for a wind up jukebox

Actually I thought it was a clever and low cost way of providing tourist information.

The other interesting feature this canal has are the splits in the bridges which would have allowed the horse to walk around the bridge without having to unhitch the tow rope to the boat.

We turned the bend approaching Preston Bagot Top Lock to see a boat exiting.  They crew kindly left the top gate open and then loitered in the lock approach allowing us to pass a line of moored boats.  Then as we passed by the lady at the tiller mentioned she reads this blog.  We did express our usual surprise suggesting there were better things to do with your time than read this tat! 

In this short timeframe I forgot to take a photo until nb De Nada had passed so a rather poor stern photo.  Thank you blog reader and happy cruising.

The domestic batteries were back to 100% so we moored for the night above Preston Bagot Bottom Lock.  There is no Three mobile voice signal here and a very intermittent data connection so it may take some time for this post to publish.

The Kiwi’s, the lost afternoon and up to heaven

We met a Kiwi couple who narrowboat for seven months every year before returning to NZ. The boat is rented out during the five month period they are hibernating in Wellington.  They’re not the only antipodeans who have adopted this strategy.  However I don’t fancy their next 18 days because they have to get the boat to the bottom of the GU for their flight home.
The kiwi is the one sensibly clothed for the chilly conditions  
Yesterday we had a BBQ lunch with Jo & Keith (nb Hadar).

It must have been a good BBQ because we didn't finish until 7pm. Around 4.30 Gary (nb Muleless) said “Hello” when passing.  He and Della had come down the Hatton Flight and managed to moor in the Saltisford Arm without us noticing.   Later he and Della passed again on their way into Warwick for a meal. 
This morning Jan went off to the Trust office to settle our account.  Three days for £22 including the electricity we used.  We departed the arm at 10.15am.
On approaching the bottom lock of the Hatton Flight (Stairway to Heaven) we noticed a boat entering and sounded our horn in the hope they would wait for us.  They did!  With live-aboard locking partners who are well experienced with the flight we rocketed up the 21 locks in 2½ hours.  A record for us!
The obligatory photo looking back down the flight with the Church of St Mary, Warwick in the distance.  Not a good photo as it was wet and misty.
Shrewley Tunnel isn't long  (433 yards) but it was very wet inside.  No point in both of us getting wet so Jan went inside.
We turned to port(the left) at Kingswood Junction and then left again shortly thereafter onto the Stratford Upon Avon Canal.  By now we had been on the move for five hour and had missed lunch. Back onto skinny locks and the first seemed to take ages to fill after the ‘modern’ locks on the GU.

There was a good mooring in the pound below the lock and we decided to finish cruising for the day.  Plenty of hot water in the calorifier after all that cruising so we both had an early shower to warm us up.

Trakt

As part of my planned development of an integrated home network media system I have subscribed to Trakt (free) and downloaded the Trakt plug-in for Kodi which is my media client (player)

What is Trakt

Trakt is a platform that does many things, but primarily keeps track of TV shows and movies you watch. It integrates with your media centre or home theatre PC to enable scrobbling, so everything is automatic.

Definition of scrobbling – to track every TV show and movie you watch, automatically from your media centre.

You can use Trakt on pc’ tablet or smartphone to check what’s available.  You are even able to rate things you have watched, or follow other people with similar tastes, or provide an opinion.  Personally I would never do the latter three as it could be used for data harvesting.

My planned future home media system will look something like this.

• Raspberry Pi to access the UseNet and download content.  It will run 24/7 and being a very low power device should cost approx $5pa to run.  The software will be:
  • Raspberrian OS
  • NZBGet
  • Sonaar
  • CouchPotato
• Combined Media Server, TV capture box and Network Access Server (NAS).  This will be the powerful ‘backend’ of the system and automatically enter hibernation when not in use thus reducing electrical consumption.  The software will be:
  • Ubuntu Server (NAS)
  • Mythtv  (free to air TV capture – 4 channels simultaneously)
  • Emby (media transcoder)
  • Trakt (database of media library and recommended available programs)
  • Filebot.  Media organiser and renaming program
• Kodi.  Media player on TV, Tablet, Smartphone.

All the above software is free. 

I have already built a MythTV box in Australia.  It incorporates a linked electronic program guide which is smart enough to remember and record programs we like.  It also automatically identifies and strips out commercial breaks before compressing the recorded data to MP4 format.

We already have the Raspberry Pi and the TV tuner cards.  I will be attempting to reuse as many old computer components as possible.  Hopefully costs will be confined to the purchase of a motherboard and processor for the planned server.  It should have sufficient processing power to simultaneously transcode media to eight separate users over the home network and internet. 

No varnishing but hopefully vanishing

We’re moored in the Saltisford Arm at Warwick and on shore power for the first time in quite a few months.  I’ve been regularly turning the Victron Inverter/Charger off and back on in a effort to both squeeze as much power into the domestic batteries as possible and to recover some lost capacity.  After the first two hours on shore power the ammeter showed a small negative value.  By turning the Victron off for 3 second and then back on I forced it to restart the ‘Bulk’ charge cycle.  When I first started doing this the ‘Bulk’ rate was 40-50 amps.  After 12 hours it’s now down to a peak of 10 amps on the initial Bulk charge which then falls quite rapidly.

The plan for today was to do some sanding and varnishing of doors and hatch linings.  However it started raining during the night and hasn’t stopped.  Consequentially the varnishing task has been deferred. 

With little to do I started searching online about upgrading the firmware on our wireless router currently in Australian storage.  It’s now starting to get old with the manufacturers upgrades ceasing in 2012.  Although I could have modified it to operate on the boat 12V system there was little point as it doesn’t accept a usb wifi dongle.  So we have a reasonably new, but relatively unused Linksys wireless router in storage. 

After some searching I’ve discovered there are two alternatives to the current dated Linksys firmware.  This might be considered as the equivalent of fitting a new drivetrain and engine to a car.  I could use Tomato or DD-WRT.  Both of them are enhancements when compared to the existing firmware and importantly, free!  Unlike the Linksys firmware, each of them is able to run a VPN (Virtual Private Network) on the router.  This has three major advantages.

1. Everything we do on our (the home) side of the internet is anonymous.
2. I won’t have to install a VPN on every device (computer, tablet, TV, etc) in the house.
3. We will only need to purchase/rent one VPN license.

You might wonder why I would want to be anonymous?  The answer is I’m starting to become paranoid about the amount of personal data being harvested by internet companies; in particular search engines and social media.  Microsoft ceased supporting Windows Live Writer because it decided blogs are a low value personal data (revenue) source.  Google would like to get rid of Blogger and move everyone to Google+ where they can be a high value quasi Facebook. 

Frankly Facebook frightens me.  I’ve never seen so many people so freely and willingly give away personal information about themselves, their friends, children and grandchildren.  Facebook deletes NOTHING!  Users may think they have deleted data, but all Facebook does is hide it from viewers.  They (and Google) employ powerful and accurate facial recognition software.  If you face appears on a friend’s Facebook page then Facebook can and do track you and what you were doing.  If you gave them your mobile phone number (to enhance your security…. hahaha!) then they are probably tracking all your movements.  This is because Facebook will be continuously running in the background on your phone..   These days I rarely place any thing on Facebook and ‘like’ even less.  Usually it’s just photos of scenery, which I never link to a recognised placename.  Consequentially Facebook bombards me with queries about whether I like certain Ads; do I know these people; please provide more personal information in my profile to enhance my experience; provide my phone number or email address to improve my security.  My usual Facebook Ads are for Viagra or Russian brides (my profile has the barest minimum of information.  I was born in 1901 and am single :-)   

Signing out.  I always sign out of Google (search, email, blog, etc) and Facebook when I’ve finished .  I never just close down the screen because the program continues to run in the background collecting data on where you go next and sending it back to Google/Facebook.  I have the browser configured to erase my browsing history when I close it and I always close the browser after using Facebook or a Google product.

After he retired, my father completed a Masters degree in computer science. I used to scoff at his paranoia over personal data protection.  Now I realise he was right!  Our son specializes in the ‘search’ side of internet marketing.  Some years ago he ceased publishing on social media sites.   Yes I am paranoid!  

The Cape of Good Hope

Fortunately it wasn’t a long cruise to reach The Cape of Good Hope.  That’s because it’s a canal side pub in Warwick owned and operated by a couple of kiwis.  Even better, the moorings were vacant when we arrived.  Although another kiwi boat arrived in the afternoon.

Not only is kiwi food available, but also kiwi beer!

For lunch I opted for a Monreith’s light ale from the West Coast of the South Island.  It contained hints of ginger and honey… very tasty.

We both selected the kiwi burger which contained beetroot and a fried egg.  I asked if they could include a slice of pineapple and whilst the staff were willing, the till objected. We also requested kumera chips instead of the usual potato. They were sooooo delicious!

I owe an apology to readers who have been viewing the blog on a mobile device and who have found the screen compressed.  When Peter (nb Kelly-Louise) informed me about the problem I immediately endeavoured to rectify the problem.  Hopefully any reader using a tablet or phone will notice things have returned to normal.

Some interesting boats

Both Jan and I remember reading a magazine article about the welder who constructed his own narrowboat and we subsequently passed the boat during a canal holiday in 2009.  We’ve now passed nb Sapphire a second time.  It’s an interesting and rather unique design.

Another interesting boat we’ve seen in this area over the past few years is this next one.

For sheer ‘bling’ this one takes first prize.

And if you’re looking for the bare necessities then it might be this one.

 

Pretty cool! 

At one point it appeared we might be about to come under attack.  He certainly looked aggressive and was approaching at speed.  But he went right past us before we realized a competitor was rapidly making an exit along the towpath.

Yesterday we stopped for water opposite The Blue Lias.  It’s an attractive looking setting but for some reason we’ve never stopped to sample the wares.

I’ve managed to by some two pack epoxy block from Colecraft who are the local distributor.  At some stage Waiouru will come out of the water for hull inspection and we will take the opportunity to give her another coat of black.  We’ve broken ice during the last two winters and the epoxy wasn't scrapped off during either occasion so I’m rather impressed with the Hempel.