Before leaving Crooke we had an appointment with Derek for some diesel.
He sells it from his old Leeds and Liverpool barge.
When we came past a couple of weeks ago, the sign said Diesel 83p a litre, but he was waiting for a delivery so we said we would call again on the way back. Today it was 88p a litre. Grrrrrr...... we needed about 180 litres!
As we got to the first lock, along came nb Sally behind us and we locked through to Wigan with them and down onto the Leigh branch too.
Coming into Wigan we pass the famous Wigan Pier,
Nothing much to see, perhaps not what you'd expect. It is in fact just the end of a tramway where the trucks would be tipped up to empty their goods into the waiting boats.
On one of the locks I noticed the old lock number carved into the stone with the newer BW plaque above. Not sure how it could have been 23! Even counting from Liverpool rather than from Leeds, I only make it 9! Or maybe it isn't a lock number at all! Perhaps somone will be able to explain.
Wednesday
14 miles, 6 locks, 1 swing bridge
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Hi Ian and Karen,
ReplyDeleteI can answer this for you! At the top of the Wigan flight is number 1 in Roman numerals so the one you saw was the 23rd from the top!
Nice to meet up with you yesterday and I will keep reading your blog :-)
Linda
NB Mary H
Strange to start numbering from there though. Guess the canal was opened in stages, so not able to number from Leeds to Liverpool as they are now?
DeleteThe normal numbering was still on the lock beams. I just assumed that the Roman numerals were for the Wigan flight. I found it useful - instead of working out how many locks we had done on my fingers I could just look at the lock tail!
DeletePetrol is going back up too :(
ReplyDelete