Alrewas - a beautiful village

We've had a nice lazy day today. After doing the 'boatwork' and a few bits of maintenance we walked round the village taking photographs for you and then headed to the George & Dragon for lunch and an afternoon playing darts.
We haven't been to Alrewas for 5 years and were worried that the George would have changed hands. Luckily Ruth & Graham are still in charge and apart from an internal facelift nothing's changed. They do a credit crunch lunch, main & pud for £5 or a larger man-size version for £10. The home-made faggots,chips & mushy peas are still delicious, just as we remembered them. Even though it's Tuesday, the pub dining room was packed and it's easy to see why they were the National winners of the Community Pub of the Year award last year.

Landlord Graham is ex-army and the pub holds lots of fund-raising events for the 'Help the Heroes' charity. There's a large painting in the games room which was done to raise money and has the names of everyone who took part in a recent 'walk for heroes' event on the bottle labels. The photo doesn't do it justice.

carved seat by Bagnall Lock

probably the best butchers around

Alrewas is a very picturesque village and has many thatched cottages.

A couple of the houses had stalls outside selling home-made preserves or cards, with payment being left in honesty boxes. I bought a jar of rhubarb & ginger jam, delicious.

a restoration project

a grey parrot aboard one of the permanently moored boats.

2 pigs snoozing in the back garden of one of the thatched cottages

 

Alrewas village

It’s quite a long post today as I have lots of photos to share with you. I hope you enjoy them.

We moved down to Alrewas village this morning. The 14 day moorings were all full so we’re on the 48 hour ones, right next to the cemetery.  We stopped here about 7 years ago in exactly the same spot and had a very spooky experience. In the middle of the night Charlie woke us all up howling in fright, looking down and barking as if he could see something ‘below’ the earth. This carried on for about an hour  when he suddenly stopped and was OK again. We couldn’t see or hear anything out of the ordinary and couldn’t understand why he was so scared. It certainly spooked us all and we didn’t stop here again for a long time.

This afternoon has been lovely, sunny and very windy so we took Chico out for a long walk. We went across Alrewas Lock which drops the canal down onto the river section where the Trent & Mersey is crossed by the River Trent.

The weir has a large floating barrier to keep boats from straying down it and today the flow was quite calm and peaceful.

The ground is still parched and cracked and we came across several large holes in a hedgerow. They seemed too big for rabbits so maybe it was a badger sett.

Following the river, we took the public footpath through Essington Meadows until the vegetation got too high. It’s obviously not a well used route and the white flowering Hedge Bedstraw was over waist height.

We diverted around a wheat field and then along the busy A38 to Wychnor Lock and walked back along the towpath, past Wychnor Church and this beautiful round stained glass window in someone's garden wall..

Wychnor Lock

Wychnor Church

The river banks are starting to turn yellow with hundreds of Yellow Iris, more commonly known as Yellow Flags.

The water in the river section is crystal clear and you can see thousands of tiny fishes swimming amongst the plants and water lilies.

Tomorrow I'll take you on a tour around this idyllic village. It's really beautiful and according to the village notice board they have lots of social events and had only one recorded instance of crime last month (a case of theft from a car).

Armitage to Alrewas

We’ve been to The Plum Pudding several times before and Roger had booked a table for my birthday dinner. When we got to our table there was an enormous bouquet of flowers and cards from our son & daughter. Such a wonderful surprise had me almost in tears!

Unfortunately that was the highlight of our visit to the restaurant. The food was awful.  There was so much coarsely ground black pepper in the dressed crab starter that at first we thought it was pieces of shell. I ate mine but Roger left most of his.

The mains were no better. My seabass  was overcooked, the sautéed potatoes burnt and the veg. under cooked but also watery.  Roger’s spaghetti carbonara had so much black pepper in it that again he couldn’t eat it.  When we complained the restaurant manageress got really stroppy and refused to deduct the cost of the uneaten food from the bill.  Needless to say we won’t be going back.

There was entertainment on at the Spode Cottage pub across the road so after taking the flowers back to the boat, we headed over there. They even had Old Speckled Hen on draught and the singer, Andy Mellor, was really good so what started as a disappointing night ended by us having a really good time.

We travelled on down to Fradley where we stopped on the visitor moorings for a late lunch. It’s a lovely stretch of canal and is very colourful at this time of year being lined on one side with purple Rhododendron bushes and fields of bright yellow rapeseed on the other.

They say that a boat’s name is a reflection of it’s owner.  What does this one say?

At Fradley we were mobbed by mallards. They obviously get well fed as they were huge and they’re also so tame they'll eat out of your hands. It would have been so easy to grab one for the pot but having previously tried mallard from the butchers and finding it to be very tough we didn't bother.

We're now moored in the countryside just below Common Lock. It's peaceful and so far we're the only ones here. We'll carry on to Alrewas in the morning and stay there for a few days while our post is redirected to the Post Restante at the local Post Office.