Almost a year

Wow, it’s April next week and this blog has almost been forgotten. That’s because we haven’t driven far due to spinal MRI scans and the consequences of those, which still continue and there’s yet another in two weeks.

Also we have installed an insulated roof on our house and solar PV panels with battery. For those who appreciate these things we now have a house which has a ‘warm’ roof (yes that’s a technical term), has a U value of 0.15 (that’s a thermal insulation term) and has 15 x 440W of solar PV and 2 x 3.68kW of inverter power with 10.25kWh of battery. Yes it can get boring in the world of ‘generate your own green electricity’, having spent a fair bit of money to buy equipment that might not necessarily been produced in a particularly green way 🙈.

However we have have ventured out into the world of Land Rover camping and pointed towards the Welsh Borders in beautiful spring weather. First stop was Chirk, somewhere between Llangollen and Oswestry. It pretty much straddles the border but our bit is in Wales, reinforced by Welsh dragon flags around.

However the influence of Thomas Telford in the 18C is just around the corner. He had a grand design to facilitate the building of a canal linking Bristol and Liverpool. The end bits into the respective ports weren’t completed but much of the rest was.

There’s tunnels and bridges, including this tunnel through which we walked without torches. Ok so what if you can see through to the other end?

Here at Chirk, together with William Jessop, they built an aqueduct to carry the Llangollen canal across from Chirk to Chirk Bank. It opened in 1801 and at 70m, was the highest navigable waterway in the world.

In 1848, the railway viaduct was built by Henry Robertson. This also straddled the valley, built parallel but a little higher. The two magnificent stone structures are a fantastic sight from below and on the top.

Yes you can walk alongside the canal and look over the low railings to the ground below, all the time imagining the horses towing the barges and looking over proportionally lower railings at the ground.

Nearby, and handy for the Caravan Club site, is Chirk castle. It’s no surprise that Telford and Robinson built those two great stylish structures. They would have seen this castle, high on a hill, built in the 14C. It set a high bar and looks stupendous today.

Somehow we were walking around the castle grounds before hours and missed the NT ticket gazebo but we weren’t the only ones.

It’s a nice leg stretch up from the site and after the visit we walked on, past some of Offa’s Dyke and wandered slowly back downhill to the north of Chirk. The views of the countryside across England were great with a couple of large factories too. A local lady had referred to them as “our blot on the landscape” but I see them as great places that actually make useful “stuff”. In this case it’s the interesting combo of chocolate based confectionery (I assume) at Cadbury Trebor Bassett and MDF at Krono-span. Both of these are essential items in the inflation calculation’s ‘basket of goods’.

We headed for Chirk Marina, only once going wrong and walking all the way around the side of a field, looking for a way out that wasn’t our way in. We dropped into the Marina but for some reason were pulled towards the shady end where several of the many barges looked as though they would never again be seeing the open waters of the canal.

I lingered next to one barge but was ushered along by Dawn and steady we walked past vessel with slightly more attractive names until we got to the posh end.

From there we walked the tow path, as many horses did in days gone by, passing the two factories out of sight but not hearing, until we climbed up, away from the longer tunnel under Chirk.