Great Northern Basin

Moored north of Sandiacre at 8:30am

A harder day than usual today, we travelled 7 miles and 11 locks in 6 hours cruising carrying on north up the Erewash Canal. We left our moorings at 8:50 and stopped for lunch at Ilkeston some 3.5 hours later. After a 0.5 hour stop we set off again arriving at the top of the canal at the perhaps over-extragently named Great Northern Basin in the industrial town of Eastwood at 15:45.

The journey was pleasant enough, helped by the warmer weather. The large locks continued to be surprisingly easy to operate despite being almost entirely set against us (ie we had to empty each lock before we could get the boat in and then fill it again to get to the next section of canal). The canal travels up the valley of the River Erewash past countryside, light industry, and the mill town of Ilkeston, formerly a major textile centre.

Densie (the blue boat) moored in the Great Northen Basin

The Great Northen Basin was formerly the junction of the Erewash, Cromford and Nottingham Canals, only the Erewash being navigable here. There are moves to reopen the Cromford canal through to near Matlock, but this will certainly take many years although parts are still in water.

Th ex-mining town of Eastwood is not the most attractive of places but has a claim to literary fame as it was the birthplace and childhood home of D H Lawrence. A further claim to fame is a very large IKEA store.

We plan to eat this evening in a local pub, our first meal out this journey. Tomorrow we may well stay in the GNB as the weather forecast is grim.