Walking the canal way
Peter Jones attempts to walk from Oxford to Coventry by canal Leg 5
T
he good news is that this leg starts at a pub and finishes at a pub, the bad
news is that there are 11 miles between them!
The Oxford canal is a classic contour canal. Instead of straight lines through cuttings and tunnels it travels round
hills and inclines. You can see Napton windmill as soon as you start but frustratingly, after four miles you are just as far away from it as you were when you started! You can break this leg into two sections, Fenny to Marston Doles which is seven miles and Marston Doles up to Napton which is just short of four. If you want a pleasant
walk through great countryside with stunning views across Warwickshire and South Northamptonshire then this is the one to do. I walked this section on the Saturday evening before the Grand Prix at Silverstone, a really warm evening, and if you do try it don’t make the same mistake that I did and wear shorts. The towpath is surprisingly overgrown in places and the brambles ‘bite your legs’. You do however, meet some interesting people. A boat load of girls celebrating a friends hen night all wearing fancy
28 August 2011
dress and the boat covered in balloons and ‘L plates’ greeted me first. I walked past their boat a dozen times until it became obvious they were not inviting me to join them! A little further on a woman was
walking her two black Labradors towards me. She was wearing a baby doll night dress and green wellys! One man was fishing off the back of his boat, a recently retired RAF officer. He had caught some signal crayfish, gudgeon and zander. The crayfish he was going to eat with some homemade mayonnaise, the gudgeon he was going to deep fry and the zander poach in local cider. He was serving all of this with some fried fungus that was growing on a nearby tree. He invited me to join him for supper, I declined. The Victorians had this great habit
of sticking the date on many of their buildings and as you reach Marston Doles there is an old warehouse with 1865 picked out on the gable end in blue engineering bricks. The warehouse was converted into offices for British Waterways but is now in private hands. Marston Doles is also the first lock since leaving Fenny Compton, but if you are on a boat you are about to have to work very hard.
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