A marvel at Marple

We said goodbye to the stone circle and headed back up the Peak Forest Canal, taking the turning south to the Macclesfield once more. Charlie, the man who we’re hoping will look at the electrics again, is away until tomorrow afternoon so we thought we’d stay overnight in the lovely Marple and check out the quaint Cinema where we're told they still have an interval and ice-cream sellers.

 

 At one with nature! Yoga pose of 'the tree' at the stone circle

Wicked willow fence

Back through the two swing bridges ...

... past the quaint townships

...  and isolated settlements,

even getting shots of towns we missed on the way there because of the torrential rain

 

We passed lots of boats on the way, and Matlows Factory, makers of 'Swizzels'

Everything is so green!

 

The local herons seem less nervous than elsewhere, and don't fly away as readily - they are so elegant!

Not sure what's going on with these portholes??

 

 Managed to avoid having to raise both lift bridges 

Plenty of boats heading to Bugsworth Basin

 

Marple Junction, very pretty in the sunshine

As we moored up I said to Barry that the boat appeared to be tilting; but he dismissed me as men are wont to do when they think a woman is just being overly cautious – until he looked below and saw that the bilge pump hadn’t been working and we had quite a bit of water on board! It didn’t help of course that we also had a full toilet tank, but we won’t bore you with those sorts of dirty tales! Barry got it working, not sure whether it’s to do with the electrics, and the tilt improved.

I went for a walk to the supermarket to get some garlic for my leek and potato soup (I love cooking while I’ve got time to shop for the right ingredients and make things from recipes; we certainly eat well on board!), but on my way I was a little distracted from the path by a craft shop advertising a workshop making sleigh cards for xmas – crikey, it can't be coming again so soon! As I was thinking that my left foot slid from under me and I almost fell onto my rear end – bloody dog pooh! How can anyone allow their canine ‘friend’ to make such a mess in the middle of a high street full of people and children? It’s beyond me, disgusting creatures (that’s the owners as well as the dogs!). I had to find somewhere to scrape my shoe and kept giving it a rinse in the puddles of water (no shortage of those!). Yuck!

Nice to see the canal used for more than boats and fishermen

 The girls lifted this poor dead squirrel out of the canal, and Barry took it to the rubbish skip - shame

Marple is just like it sounds - a town from the Miss Marple series. Unfortunately Barry didn’t really take any photographs as all he did was go to the hardware store again, but must’ve forgotten his camera! Strange; maybe he’s winding down …

 

We did take a couple of shots at the The Regent cinema. It’s a well preserved theatre that looks as though it’s time-warped in the 1960’s. We saw the movie about the life of Coco Chanel, the French fashion icon, with Audrey Tautou in the lead – magnificent! I love stories about strong women who refuse to be subjugated by society or men.  Barry wasn’t quite so enthralled, and I think he was one of only two males in the audience of mostly middle aged and elderly women! Bless him – he did enjoy his popcorn, revels and an ice cream in the interval though!

 

Remember ice-cram sellers in the interval all those years ago?

  And on the first floor, at the entrance to 'The Circle', was a fabulous grand piano

Buxton - water everywhere!

We were relieved to see that we hadn’t been served with a fine overnight, though Barry did go and chat with the Inland Waterways Association (IWA) volunteers in the shop later that morning to ‘confess’ our rule flouting! He said that the bloke who normally enforces it was away so not to worry; phew!

After a trip to Tesco’s, we found a mooring close to the junction of Whaley Bridge and Bugsworth Basin so decided to fill up with water and move there before meeting Lisa and Rob and getting the train this afternoon. We had to back out of the spot we were in so I had to hold the pole and push us off at times. Unfortunately one of the times the pole slipped on the rocks and I fell ‘smack’ onto the metal ridge at the front of the boat on my hip bone. Ouch! Another boat injury!

Trying to make the picnic lunch whilst crying in pain, I suddenly noticed water also coming into the boat as well as out of my eyes!  Barry had put the hose into the water filler hole, then turned on the tap and left it while he disposed of the rubbish.  The pressure of the water meant that the hose came out and was wooshing around the inside of the boat like a hissing snake - oh dear, a bit of a mopping up operation required ...

A couple of Panadol later and we went and met Lisa and Rob and got the train to Buxton. It’s a lovely journey, though only 20 minutes long, but it gave us a chance to see some more of the Peak District.

Buxton is rather like a miniature version of Bath – it even has a ‘Crescent’, only about a quarter of the size of Bath’s but similar otherwise. It’s currently being restored back to an hotel, having been built by the Duke of Devonshire in 1784 to house visitors to the town’s health giving spa.

 

A typical Buxton street and the Opera House

Inside The Pavilion and some of the colourful flowers

The Pavilion Garden’s was opened in 1871 and restored in 2000, encompassing 23 acres of land given to the seventh Duke of Devonshire (not sure why these Devonshire Dukes feature so prominently this far up north?!). In ‘The Pavilion’ there’s lots of information about the history of Buxton and the vast amount of money that has been spent in recent years ‘doing it up’, and there’s a wonderful collage of photographs from around the Peak District that were taken from a helicopter during the course of a day, along with some prose to describe the area. Barry was impressed so it must’ve been good!

 

The Pavilion dome and surrounding gardens complete with train!

Bottoms Up Boys!  Ducks trying to eat 'proper' duck food, i.e. corn, which just sinks!

More of the exquisite gardens, lovely walk with the sound of the brass band playing from the bandstand

After more strolling around we thought we’d stop for a cuppa at a little tea shop, where Barry and I surreptitiously ate our Bakewell Tarts from Tesco’s – Bakewell is a little town in the south east of the Peak District so when in Rome …

The lovely Lisa and Rob after a couple of cuppas ...

... and following a walk through 'The Slopes'

which is certainly well kept

The Crescent

More views around Buxton

Looking back towards the dome of the University of Derby buildings

They certainly loved their domes back then! 

The ceiling in the foyer of the opera house

It rained a little this afternoon for the first time in 48 hours, and it's starting to get dark around 7.30pm now.  We headed back to Whaley Bridge on the 5.27pm train so Lisa and Rob could get home before dusk. It was great to see them both, even for a short time.

 We caught the 'Last Train From Buxton'

Barry and I returned to the boat and sat on the little stone circle on the side of the canal next to where we were moored, and read some of the Sunday paper (The Sunday Times). We find it amazing that anyone can read a Sunday paper in one day, unless they do nothing else throughout the day! They‘re huge, full of supplements never mind just the ‘news’ part. It’ll take us the remainder of the week to get through it, but I feel we should find out what’s going on in the rest of the world every now and then. We can mostly avoid it living on the canals, it’s like a parallel universe where you can leave behind most 'normal' things!

However, we can’t avoid the fact that much to our distress the electrics started playing up again this morning so we’re thinking it’s gonna be a new alternator which won't be good news :-(

A busy ‘doing’ day

As we’re staying here until tomorrow evening we’ve been getting all sorts of things ‘done’. There's lots of organising still for the September wedding, so I've been doing some of that and Barry’s been to the timber yard to get his bits for some jobs on the boat.

Barry then biked to Chinley, the next town, to check if there really was a laundrette there as we'd heard, and if it was within walking distance of Bugsworth Basin.  As it was three and a half miles away, and all uphill, we decided to take the bus instead where I spent the afternoon washing and drying whilst reading my book! There’s something bizarrely therapeutic about sitting reading in a launderette, knowing your clothes will all soon be washed and you’ll have clean sheets on the bed tonight!

 Three bags full, and that wasn't all of it!

The church by the bus stop; a picture while we waited

The people we’ve met in the area seem very chirpy; the bus driver had a wry sense of humour. When I got on I asked for two returns to Chinley and he said, straight faced, “That’ll be £12.90 each.”; to which I retorted “You must be joking; it’s only one stop!” He just smiled sweetly, took my £5 note (the one I’d retrieved from the loo the night before!), and gave me £1.70 change. Very amusing!

Barry caught the bus back to the boat and built himself a shelf at the back to put the laptop on so that he can play music, and did a bit of wood staining on the cratch at the front.

Later on, after he’d come back to Chinley to collect the washing and me, we had a walk to find other moorings. We’d discovered that we'd mistakenly ‘parked up’ in a permanent mooring spot, but also that if we didn’t move after 48 hours we could get ‘fined’ £10 a night thereafter. We’d never seen the orange BW infringement notices anywhere before, and weren’t sure if they’d really carry it out; it certainly wasn’t very busy in the Basin.

  Some more views of Whaley Bridge

We didn’t find another suitable spot so we had a long walk back to Buxworth via a public footpath which took us over a hill where we had some incredible views, at one stage walking straight through a farmyard. We don’t get the public footpath’s/rights of way to the same extent in NZ – there are ‘The Five Great Walks’, but mostly the countryside is privately owned and you’re not allowed to walk on it, just look. But it’s still very beautiful.

Up and over the hill

You can see Northern Pride at the bottom left

 

Old farm barn

These two characters graced the doorway of a local farmhouse

   

More shots of Bugsworth Basin, with a reproduction centre support for the Cantelever Crane

 

At the very last moment of the day the sun finally shone!!

We decided to risk the fine and stayed put for another night as we’re going to Buxton by train from Whaley Bridge tomorrow with Lisa and Rob. Amazingly enough, we've had no rain today for the first time in ages; fingers crossed that it stays that way tomorrow …