Spooky Cutting, Rock and Cobblers

Imagine a massive block of cheese.  Now imagine a massive block of cheese the colour and texture of a Cadbury's Flake bar.  Only, imagine it is purpley-brown rather than the more standard chocolatey brown of a Flake.  This purpley brown Flake-cheese you are imagining makes up the ground in this bit of Shropshire.  It goes on for miles; the crumbliest, flakiest ground cover in the land. Over a hundred years ago some bright spark decided to ignite a load of dynamite and blast a channel through a particularly annoying lumpy bit of the Flake-cheese.  It was annoying chiefly because the bright spark in question wanted to build a canal, and the lumpy bit (geologists call them 'hills' I believe) was squarely in the way.  Now if this person was such a bright spark, suggests Alan, then they would have just bunged a couple of locks in their canal and gone over the hill instead of exploding their way through it.  Good point.  Perhaps they'd sold out of locks down the shops. Or perhaps they were just living up to their nickname.  Whatever the reason, I am rather chuffed they decided to cut this two mile long, 15ft wide swathe through this lump of crumbly, cheesy-chocolate earth, because it is one of the spookiest paces I have ever been on any form of transport. 

Al and I entered Woodseaves Cutting, as this channel is known, at about 7 o'clock on Monday evening.  The spuds were in the oven baking away and the damson cobbler I'd knocked up last night was sitting on the stove.  The blobs of pastry had sunk pinkly into the blood red stew of damsons and sugar making it look like casseroled murder evidence.  We had left Market Drayton earlier in the day after stocking up at Netto on loo paper and chocolate digestives, two vital pieces of kit for any water-gypsy.  We had been loitering in the area for a while; on Friday we spoke to our old mates Andy and Chelle, and planned for them to pop down the following afternoon for a visit.  Chelle, for her part, is about as pregnant as you can get (her baby was due the next day) so some flexibility had to be built into this plan.  Andy worked out that he could get from us to the birthing pool at their house in an hour and a half, so the little blighter would have to be quicker than Zola Budd to beat them to it if Chelle's waters broke.  He signed off from the phone call with a priceless one: "So, tomorrow it's either canal or birth canal".  I laughed for a long time.

Saturday dawned and no baby so our visitors duly arrived with their three year old daughter Freya who, perhaps on finding the boat somewhat more to her scale, began immediately and very cutely to play house, promptly curling up in our bed whenever the excitement got too much for her.  It put me in mind of how my sister had reacted to the boat when she first saw it, exclaiming "It's like a Sindy-House!".  Now that is not exactly true.  As anyone whose Sindy owned a Town House in the mid-eighties will doubtless remember, the Town House had an exterior mock-wrought-iron lift (or "elevator" as the box exotically described it) between the three floors of her Luxurious Sindy Residence.  Little More has no such elevator, unfortunately.  But, like a doll's house it does have a minuscule shower.  Drop the soap and you will never retrieve it unless you happen to be one of those Yogis who can bend over and fold yourself neatly in three. 

But I digress.  After a lovely afternoon and the hugest pub lunch I have ever put away, we waved the Beacock family off; Andy in his funky leather jacket, Freya in her "Big Girl's Car Seat" and Chelle in her 40th week of pregnancy. (I still cannot believe she was so hardcore - I mean it was due the next day...the next day!)*  Alan and I then chugged back to Audlem to go to a gig in the village Scout and Guide Hall.  Rock, yes, and indeed roll.  French rolls actually, nice soft ones which were served with a lovely bowl of chilli at the gig for the bargainous price of £1.  As we ate, we and around fifty people from the village watched a series of local young bands have a pretty impressive go.  The gig was organised by a local thesp called Peter Marshall, a compact and bumptious man who had lived in Audlem for over two decades.  Straw mopped, clad in a purple tie-dye t-shirt with craggy blue eyes that brimmed with confidence and goodwill, Peter and his missus Jane had founded a theatre company based on a canal boat twenty years ago.  I had heard that they were based in Audlem and, in the spirit of trying to meet as many people as possible on this trip, I found their number on the web and decided I would phone them up at their house.  Luckily for me Peter Marshall was totally unflummoxed to have a total stranger ring him up at home to ask if he fancied a pint and a chinwag.  He didn't tell me to bugger off.  He didn't even say he had a lot to do in the next week which is the Almost-Polite way of saying bugger off.  He didn't hang up either, cutting out the middle man and just buggering off himself.  Instead he invited Alan and myself to his Chilli-Evening, which was conceived to give young bands in this impossibly out of the way rural area a bit of a bump-start.  Villagers of all ages, heights and widths milled around us, eating chilli and drinking booze brought from the local Co-op while bands containing their neighbours or children (some from the local Co-op – we were served by one the next day) played through proper amps on a little makeshift stage with proper disco lights.  It was a little like turning up at the wedding reception of someone you don't know but would probably like if you did.   The goodwill towards the players was palpable;  the door man kept coming over the tannoy urging us to eat more chilli, and to make sure we drop something into the collection bucket to go towards the bands.  It was a community not being cynical about its young people, and it was brilliant.

We had a long walk back along the towpath to our boat afterwards.  We are getting rather bold these days, walking confidently in the sort of darkness that would've made various parts of our anatomy contract tightly with fear before coming on this trip.  After being inspired by our friend Polly we are even eschewing the use of a torch on the long walks in the lampless darkness that you get on the towpath these days.  Perhaps this is why we were initially unperturbed when entering the narrow tree-enclosed channel of Woodseaves Cutting on our boat, just as the light was fading on Monday.  We were travelling East, into the dusk and as the Ash trees loomed we steered the boat into the shadows with the blasé attitude that only comes with forgetting how quickly dusk can turn into darkness.  The cutting was two and a half miles long, and at three miles an hour, that is a fair amount of driving time in the gathering gloom.  Problem was, we could not go at three miles an hour; the entrance to the cutting bore a sign with the very encouraging image of rocks tumbling down a slope into water and urged boaters, for their safety, to go at 2mph.  That'll be an hour in the cutting, then.  Til' 8 o'clock and near-twilight conditions in fact.  Add to that the gloaming presence of huge mature Ash trees and oaks and you are pretty much looking at travelling in darkness with the possibility of rocks falling on you.  But you don't go on an adventure if you are not adventurous, so in we chugged. 

Now, I am not going to try and create a false sense of suspense here; nothing remotely dramatic happened to us in Woodseaves Cutting.  But it was spooky.  And beautiful, too, the canal snaking out into the west behind us like a gold thread reflecting a sunset we could no longer see.  As we travelled further in, the sides of the cutting rose higher until our narrow 10 foot channel was framed by thirty feet rises on either side; huge trees holding onto the crumbly purple earth with all their might.  Sometimes, to our fascinated discomfort we would see a tree that had failed to hold on tightly enough to the yielding soil and had careened over, taking a myriad of smaller shrubs with it, its massive roots sticking incongruously up into the night air like a protest.  Huge birds whose silhouettes I could only just decipher flew out of this battlefield of trees across the water occasionally, heightening the illusion that we could be moving through a prehistoric landscape that was not the domain of humans, let alone their silly boats.  Occasionally we would meet a bridge, high and angular and purple-red like the earth they rose out of that stood out like a sign that humans had been here before, but otherwise Alan and I moved slowly and as quietly as our boat ever does through a strange,unpopulated and unstable bit of the canal where the trees and the earth and the birds are in charge.

* Far as I know it hasn't come yet.

Comments

[Andrew Beacock]

Still not come... Chelle is getting fed up!

[Polly]

Ace story. I want chilli now. Good luck to Chelle...

Yeah! torches are for losers.

*falls down large hole*

[toast]

All the best chelle!

Right... polly and the whole not-using-torches 'thang'...her brother is the same - if you are ever in cumbria, i'll show you the river he fell in... twice. Its not big and its not clever - use a torch

[Polly]

oh yeah i'd deffo use one in cumbria - just don't find you generally need one in the neon haze of a city. And my brother had been drinking rather a lot on the occasion of the double river-falling-in so i think quoting this story is a little unfair on torchless wanderers! But anyway, yeah, don't try this at home kids, or something.

[James Robbins]

Fab,I Love spooky cuttings, stewed murder evidence with baked potatoes, rock 'n roll in a village hall and places where birds and trees are in charge. Hope the baby is worth the wait for it's family! Love James

[iain smith]

love the story, love chilli to.Shropshire is of course one of the most haunting if not haunted counties in Britain. It sounds like a wonderful location.

[iain smith]

love the story, love chilli to.Shropshire is of course one of the most haunting if not haunted counties in Britain. It sounds like a wonderful location.

[iain smith]

love the story, love chilli to.Shropshire is of course one of the most haunting if not haunted counties in Britain. It sounds like a wonderful location.

[iain smith]

love the story, love chilli to.Shropshire is of course one of the most haunting if not haunted counties in Britain. It sounds like a wonderful location.