I'm a #StructuralEngineer by day, working mostly in #steel and #concrete. I do everything, but a lot more moving #bridges and #canal locks than most. Some #dams. All my stuff is old, so it's mostly about safety and reliability.
Second job: very willing farmhand for @PickwickSheprd, who I think mostly puts up with me because she was crazy enough to marry me. We raise #sheep and she trains #sheepdogs. I fix the old #tractors and help run #fences and #buildings.
Just learned the story of the Union #Canal, connecting #Edinburgh to #Glasgow. Amazing history of engineering, technology, and politics.
There’s an episode of “Great Canal Journeys” featuring the Union Canal on Prime Video with some great aerial views of #aqueducts, #locks (not lochs!), and the #Falkirk Wheel.
It's nonstop birds and hawthorns in bloom, out here in the middle of nowhere, clear of the industrial outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent.
Spring on the Caldon canal seems to be a few weeks behind the rest of the midlands, judging by what's blooming and the size of moorhen chicks and goose goslings.
We are well beyond the urban bustle, now, and the canal has returned to a green and peaceful state.
After heading northwest through some heavy industrial terrain, we made a sharp eastward turn and then northeast past the HS2 construction. As we left #Birmingham, each lock had less graffiti, less litter, and less floating debris than the one before it.
With the help of two Collins Nicholson "Waterways Guide" mapbooks, a £5 dataplan and a search engine, my husband just worked out our boating route for the next two or three weeks.
Me, I don't care where we go, as long as we boat there together. I was dancing around, all "Yay, we have a route!" and he said when I'm done being a disco monkey, I can put the mapbooks away.
🐒
The canals in England predate its railroad by several decades.
Roughly I50 years ago, Canada's Atlantic-to-Pacific railroad was built by Chinese navvies (a term that comes from the navigators who built England's canals). It was deadly work.
Gordon Lightfoot, who died this week, memorialised the navvies in this beautiful story of a song, Canadian Railroad Trilogy, commissioned by CBC for Canada's centennial year.