Sonning - the Bear on a Boat.: An Autumn Cruise: Part 2

After making our way up the Macclesfield Canal and having a short visit to Manchester by train, we set off along the Peak Forest Canal on a bright and sunny morning.

Endon and Huddlesford went on the roof and took little Waverley with them, tying a ribbon round his waist to make sure he couldn't slip off and into the water.

We turned right at the junction. To the left was the first of the locks taking the canal down towards Manchester, but we weren't going that way. Instead, we were heading for a place called Whaley Bridge.

Polar kept us at the junction for a while, as Grizzly was taking some rubbish to the special skips for boaters to use, so she managed to get some good pictures of the buildings and bridges there.

We all thought it was very pretty. Hanley and I climbed up on the back of one of the chairs for a good view out of the window. We didn't mind the other bears being on the roof, as we had enjoyed our turn.

Soon we started to see higher hills, as the canal wound along above the valley of the River Goyt towards the Peak District. It was so clear that we could see all the way to Kinder Scout, at the southern end of the Pennine Way.

Not long after our view of Kinder Scout, we went into a wooded section of the canal, then found ourselves on the outskirts of a small town. Being bears, with very good noses, we could also smell sweeties and soon even the humans could smell them!

We were at New Mills and the smell was coming from the Swizzles factory right beside the canal! This is where lots of famous sweets - like Love Hearts and Fizzers - are made. Polar always says she thinks the view of the marina and the mill here is one of her favourite locations on the canal network too.

We had our lunch overlooking the railway viaduct across the river. New Mills has two different stations as there are railway lines from Manchester on either side of the valley - one going to Sheffield and the other to Buxton.

Hanley and I joined Waverley for the last part of the journey from there into Whaley Bridge. None of us had been there before as the last time we came along this canal, we had turned left at the junction and moored at the Bugsworth Basin, outside the town.

There is a long line of boats people live on leading into the town, so we had to go past very slowly. We waved to the boat people and their pets and some of them waved back.

At the end of the canal arm is a big "winding hole" for turning boats. A pump was lifting water out of the Goyt and using it to top up the canal, which loses a lot every day down the locks at Bosley and Marple.

The top-up water used to come from a big reservoir above the town, which you might have heard about in the news a couple of years ago...

After very heavy rain during the summer of 2019 - not long after our last trip along this canal - the retaining wall of the Todbrook Reservoir, up the valley from Whaley Bridge, started to give way! All the local people had to leave their houses in case it collapsed completely, as the town would have been destroyed.

Luckily, the RAF had some big helicopters they could use to bring in huge bags of ballast to stop the wall giving way, and they rescued the town. The local people have lots of ways of remembering them - including this big model of a Chinook in the old transhipment warehouse by the canal, which we bears thought was excellent.

While we were at Whaley Bridge, Polar did some sewing and made new clothes for Huddlesford, Endon and Waverley. Huddles got a smart felt overcoat, Endon got a new sock jumper and hat for climbing in, and little Waverley got a warm winter onesie.

We had a day out in Buxton while we were at Whaley Bridge, which I will write about in another post as there is lots to say about it. After that, we pottered round to Bugsworth Basin as Hanley, Endon and I all wanted to see it again, and we stayed there overnight.

We took Huddlesford and Waverley with us to see some of the old pump equipment and the model of the basin when it was a busy inland port, which they thought we marvellous.

There was some repair work going on at the top of the site, repairing some of the retaining walls, but we are always pleased to see the Canal and River Trust repair people at work, as they keep our waterways safe to navigate, and there were still plenty of places for visiting boats to moor.

We had a sunny day for the first part of our journey back to Marple. I will tell you all about a very exciting visit to New Mills we made later that day in another post, as that was very interesting, especially to Hanley and Huddlesford who like industrial history.