Three Bears and Four Counties. Part Four - Acton Trussell to Barlaston

 Our last day on the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal started brightly but, as there were some locks to work through, Polar and Grizzly suggested we didn't go up on the roof that morning.

We met some Inland Waterways Association friends at Deptmore Lock, Mr Roger who edits the newsletter and Mrs Margaret, who waved to us when they saw us in the cratch, and we waved back.

'I must write some more articles for Mr Roger,' I said to Hanley and Endon.  'The humans don't always get their items in to him in good time, but I am a good bear and a serious journalist, and I always do!'

A little while after we passed the Stafford Boat Club and some wetlands where we saw lots of geese, we came to the place where the Staffordshire Riverway Link aims to restore a navigable route into the town of Stafford.  

We were excited to see that work had already started!  Someone from the volunteers who run the project was going to be talking to our Inland Waterways Association group, but Polar had to cancel all the talks due to the nasty virus.  This is sad, because we like going to them and seeing our friends, listening to the speakers and - sometimes - winning things in the raffle.

We cruised along beside the railway line until we were near Tixall Lock and, soon after that, got to Tixall Wide, where the canal spreads out into a big pool.  It's close to the Shugborough Estate, where we had one of our last Small Bear Adventures before this year's 'lockdown' for humans started.

'This was where we came when we were first practicing steering and turning Uppie,' Polar told us, when we stopped there for lunch.  'It's very near the marina where we bought Uppie.'

When we set off again, we went over an aqueduct above the River Trent, and Hanley Bear, who was wearing his Stoke City scarf and hat, cheered.  'If we followed that river, we'd get all the way back to Stoke!' he said.

Which was what we planned to do, of course.  

At Great Haywood Junction, we turned left onto the Trent and Mersey Canal and I was back on a waterway I had travelled before, although the smaller bears hadn't been here by boat before.

The canal between Great Haywood and Stone is one of Grizzly's favourite stretches of waterway, because it travels through some lovely rural scenery and also has some good views of the West Coast Main Line railway.  

We found a nice mooring for the night a little way above Weston Lock, and settled down for another quiet evening on the boat.  As it was chilly, Polar lit the little wood-burning stove to keep us all cosy.

It was chilly in the morning too, so Grizzly made porridge for us all, before we worked through Aston Lock and up into Stone, where we were lucky to get a mooring between the locks, right in the middle of town.

'Who wants fish and chips?' asked Grizzly, and we all cheered, so he popped his mask on and went to buy some for us all.

When we got up through the next lock, we found that the waterfront in Stone had changed quite dramatically, but in a good way, with some nice new buildings that match the style of the old Joules Brewery nearby.  We bears were very impressed.

At the third lock, there is a tunnel under the road built specially for boat horses, while the last lock is close to the railway line.

After Stone, there are four locks to go up at Meaford, then we were onto the section leading to Stoke-on-Trent.  There's a lovely wharf at Barlaston (a private one, belonging to the people in the nice house) and a row of cottages which we think would be very nice for boat-loving bears to live in.

We decided to moor a little further on, near the Wedgwood Factory.

'We have been here before,' said Hanley Bear, and he was right, because we had sometimes stopped there when we took Uppie to get Grizzly and Hanley to a Stoke City game.

So now even the smaller bears had finished exploring new canals, but we still had a few days of our boating holiday to enjoy.