Today we're going to do something a little bit different.
Oooh where are we?
Well, interesting question.
If you got a pin and a map of England
and just put it right in the middle of England,
that's roughly where we are,
we're just outside Rugby at the bottom of Hillmorton Locks
and they are officially, according to the Canal and River Trust,
the busiest flight of locks in the country.
Oooooh!
Now normally, we kind of time-lapse through locks
and speed it up a little bit
or if there's an interesting story,
like when they bombed Bunbury Lock,
[Laughs]
works every time,
we'll tell you that.
But Hillmorton's a little bit different,
not only is it the busiest flight of locks in the country,
but there's a set of boaters and volunteer lock keepers
and businesses that have set up
this really interesting micro community around the canal.
So today we're going to spend a day showing you life at Hillmorton Locks.
[Music playing]
Built in the early 1770's
the Morton Flight as it was known back then
was a single set of three locks raising the Oxford Canal by about 19 feet.
By the time the canal finally reached Oxford in 1790,
trade was booming.
But the Morton Locks had become a constant bottleneck
and the delays were costing boatman and the canal company a lot of money.
The solution was to build a second duplicate lock
at the side of each of the original ones
and they were completed in the 1840's
it eased the bottleneck and it saved a lot of precious water.
Over 20,000 working boats used the locks every year
and even today despite the working boats long since gone,
about eight and a half thousand leisure boats use these locks every year
and that makes Hillmorton the busiest flight of locks in the country.
[Music playing]
Before we get started with the locks,
I met up with Kevin, who as well as being the lead volunteer at Hillmorton locks,
is also a mine of information about the area.
So I started by asking him
what motivated him to join the volunteers in the first place.
Well in the first place, I live locally and after I retired,
I used to come down here walking the dog
and I saw the other volunteers
and I thought it might be something that I'd like to get into.
But the real motivation is be out in the fresh air,
put something back to the local community
and meeting meeting people,
it's really good to meet all kinds of different people on the lock side.
You get sort of 5 or 6 minutes, maybe longer as they come through the lock.
I once likened it to speed dating.
I don't know whether you want that last bit in.
[Colin] Definitely, did you ever meet anybody through it though?
No [Laughs]
That's my wife you've just, [Laughing]
[Laughing]
you've just met the wife, [laughing]
I volunteer with the wife. [Laughing]
[Laughing]
I guess the clue's in the job title,
but what exactly does a volunteer lock keeper do.
So we are here to help boaters,
we're here to really teach the the novices, the people that are new to it,
so that they go away from here with skills.
It's no good doing it all for them and then they get out in the wild
and they're on their own and they don't know what to do
and apart from that, we look after the general grounds.
We do some maintenance, light maintenance
so oil and greasing of the of the paddle gear and the collars.
We've established a herb garden,
the picnic tables, they've been designed and built by the volunteers.
[Colin] I mentioned at the start of the video that Hillmorton Locks were consistently
the busiest locks in the country.
I asked Kevin if you knew why they're so popular.
There's three main reasons,
firstly we do have a number of hire boat companies either side of the locks,
but also we sit on two rings.
So this is part of the Warwickshire Ring
and is also part of the Leicestershire ring,
but if you if you zoom out and look at a map of the canal network of the UK,
it looks a little bit like a 'H',
so you've got canal going up the east side and the west side
and this is the bar in the middle.
[Colin] We've been through Hillmorton Locks a couple of times now
and I can never work out which is the original
and which is the newer duplicated lock.
Did Kevin know?
The 1840 locks have cast iron ground paddles at either end,
whereas the earlier lock has gate paddles at the bottom end
and smaller ground paddles at the top end.
Last time we were here, I borrowed a book and I donated one of mine in exchange,
but this time I've noticed that they've got stickers on them,
what's that all about?
so we've run a bookstop for a number of years
and about five years ago
we decided that we could build a modular bookcase
that fits in the empty window space here.
But new for this year, is all of the books now have a little Hillmorton Lock sticker on them
and we'd like your photographs of where on the network
the books you take from Hillmorton end up
if you're interested in joining the team of volunteers for the Canal and River Trust,
we've put a link in the video description
and it shows all the positions that are available and how to become involved.
[Music playing]
The three duplicated locks are numbered in pairs from 2 to 7,
but where's lock 1?
Well remember Sutton Stop back at Hawkesbury Junction?
That was lock 1,
even though it's just a stop lock
and of the six locks here, lock 2 is a little bit special.
Back in the mid 1800's when about 20,000 boats a year were using these locks,
you can imagine that the gates took a fair bit of hammering.
To make the gates stronger, each one was supplied with large cast iron gates
instead of the usual timber ones.
Lock 2's bottom gates are now the only ones that are still made from cast iron
and as a result they're grade two listed and that means
they're a special interest, so every efforts got to be made to preserve them.
[Music playing]
A single lock at Hillmorton uses about 100,000 litres of water.
so based on the near 8 and a half thousand boats
that use these locks in an average year.
that equates to about 836 million litres of water every year.
So where exactly does all that water come from?
Well some of it comes from the River Swift
which is about five miles away
and it's carried down the disused Brownsover Arm of the canal,
from here it's pumped up to the top lock by the pumping station
and that can move a staggering 17 million litres of water every single day.
As well as the river, water also comes into the top pound from local streams,
the Daventry and Drayton reservoirs
and some other reservoirs further south on the Oxford Canal.
[Music playing]
When towns and cities are redeveloped over the years,
sometimes it's difficult to remember how things used to look
and around the canals things haven't changed that much in over 250 years.
People's need for faster travel and convenience has grown
so much since the industrial revolution.
But the canals had it right from day one,
so there's never been a need to change.
The buildings by the locks were originally the workshops
for the Oxford Canal Company,
but over the years they've been transformed,
redeveloped into a cafe shops and businesses
and it's now a thriving community within Hillmorton.
One business you might recognise is Compoost Toilets,
it's where we bought our separating toilet from just over a year ago.
Now I know these always have cake,
so I couldn't resist dropping in to see how they were getting on.
[Music playing]
Nigel and Lorraine have got narrowboat themselves
and it was Nigel's idea to design and build his own toilet
that led to the business developing.
Up until a few months ago
they were making and selling toilets from their own house in the Midlands,
but they've recently moved to these premises at Hillmorton.
After I'd finished off the cake,
I asked the guys what made them set up shop here by the locks.
Well at home, the toilets were just taking over our house,
we needed somewhere else to work.
We'd had a boat, which isn't on the water yet
and we do a lot of walking around this area
and we just thought, what a lovely location to set up business
and we now get the passing trade as well.
[Colin] Being a separating toilet
it's easy to compost the waste if you've got the facilities
and I was really surprised at the different
type of customers that Nigel and Lorraine were attracting
We have people that do glamping,
motorhomes, campers,
adventure trucks and boats.
[Colin] So what is it about their toilets
that are making them so successful at the moment.
Well it looks like a real toilet, they like the build quality
they don't have to move around
to empty pump outs and you don't have to deal with emptying cassettes.
A couple of doors down from Compoost,
is what I can only describe as my idea of pure heaven.
It's the most densely packed model railway shop I've ever seen.
Excuse me I might be a while.
[Music playing]
Seriously though, if you've watched our previous vlogs you'll know
how much i love model railways
and I'd love to have one on the boat but, 'A' I don't have the money
and 'B' I don't think Shaun would appreciate me taking up the little space we've got.
Although i wonder if Tony can help me out.
[Colin] Hello.
[Tony] Hey, how you doing?
I've got a narrowboat, it's 57 foot long, 6 foot 10 wide
OK.
and I want to build a train set on it, can you help me?
Certainly can, follow me.
[Laughs] Ohhhhh!
After literally a few hours of playing with trains, I asked store owner Tony,
How he got to own this oasis of train heaven.
the shop was already here when I was looking to buy a business,
I'd always, I've been in the industry on and off since i was 16 and
the guy who owned this before me was, it was a retirement business anyway,
but it finally got to the point where he wanted to retire and
offered me the chance to buy it and it felt like
a natural progression of my career basically.
[Colin] It's quite an unusual place
to have a model train shop, so i asked him what is it about Hillmorton that he likes.
It's a really nice scenic location,
it's nice to be out of the town really, it's sort of nice to be in the countryside
and in the in the quiet almost.
There's a great community around here, all the unit owners look out for each other.
The canal people are great, it's, yeah it's good, it's really nice around here.
I could stay here all day,
but Shaun's been texting me to tell me my dinner's going cold
cold so I'd better get off,
but i'm not going empty-handed.
Cheers Tony, thanks a lot mate.
You didn't think he was giving me some real trains did you.
[Music playing]
You might have noticed the lines in the lock balance beams,
these are called lock lines
and it's poetry which has been carved into the wood
to commemorate the inaugural year of
the Canal and River Trust back in 2012.
These four lines on the top gates of the middle locks at Hillmorton
are actually part of a longer poem,
which was written by poet, Roy Fisher
and he died back in 2017.
Now I don't read a lot of poetry, I'm not going to pretend that I'm into it.
But to celebrate his work and to pay tribute to him,
I got a few people to recite the full poem.
[Soft piano music playing]
It's a bit sad that James Brindley never lived
to see boats going through the locks that he designed,
but the village did honour him
by naming the main street through Hillmorton after him,
which was nice of them.
[Shaun] It is nice of them.
Not as quite as nice as you, not letting me walk out of that shop
with all that train set.
I had you go in for a second didn't I, when you saw that box.
You should have heard the swear words.
Two of them I haven't heard since my grandad died.
[Laughing]
It's a fascinating little place,
it's like a micro community around the canal
[Shaun] Yes
that's been established for hundreds of years.
But it's still going strong and it just goes to show
how important the canals still are to places like this.
We hope you've enjoyed it and
and and and
N-Sinc, I was thinking of
and that you've [Laughs]
that you've enjoyed this episode.
We've loved making it and loved meeting everybody
Yes
that lives and works and boats through Hillmorton.
It's been a great day hasn't it?
It has, loved it.
If you've enjoyed the episode and we hope you have
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Hit the thumbs up button if you liked it
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I wonder where we going next week.
Ohhh!
We might be going to Braunston.
See you later, bye.
Ta-ra.
[Music playing]
I think that was it.
[Music playing]