Nantwich

Spent the day in Nantwich. The town centre is attractive with a number of Elizabethan black and white buildings, mainly shops and pubs now. There are also old alms houses and Georgian buildings on the road from the mooring to the centre.

Its the best part of a mile walk into the town centre. We are making the return trip three times today. This morning we went shopping for groceries. Mr Morrison kindly obliged again. In the afternoon we went in to buy some books and look around the town museum which had a special exhibition on the local canal and the people who worked on it. All quite interesting.

This evening we will be eating out at a local pub, recommended by CAMRA and with a rather better than normal bar menu.

Our mooring is near the north end of the Nantwich Embankment which is itself at the north end of Thomas Telford's Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal, later merged with the Chester Canal to form the Shropshire Union. It was one of the last canals built before the railway age and like much of Telford's work is an impressive piece of engineering.

Other canals may meander around the contours, Telford built flat and straight. Constructed on a "cut and fill" basis, like modern motorways, inconvenient valleys are crossed by massive embankments created from the excavations of large cuttings through the hills. Locks are reduced to a minimum and are usually in flights which improves their efficiency of use and construction.