Leicester or East Midlands Ring
A meeting of waters
THE Leicester Ring meanders through five counties – Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire – with peaceful disregard for boundaries. And with rivers, aqueducts, lock staircases and five tunnels to navigate, it can be a challenge for the skills of boaters who tend to travel the ring anti-clockwise in order to work with the current of the River Soar.
The ring sets off from its namesake, Leicester, one of England’s oldest cities. Once a settlement of Celts, in AD50 it was a Roman city with the Fosse Way helping launch the city’s tradition as a trading centre. There are remains of the baths at the Jewry Wall and artefacts kept in the nearby museum. Leicester is also home to the National Space Centre and has a 700-year-old covered market, places to eat including some renowned Indian restaurants, shopping, sports and leisure facilities too.
The charismatic River Soar heads away from Leicester in style, passing Loughborough renowned for the steam trains of the Great Central Railway. Trent Lock sits at the crossroads where the River Soar meets the River Trent and Erewash Canal. Wild flora, water birds and narrowboats pirouette in an idyllic landscape under the gaze of Ratcliffe Power Station. The ring briefly heads west on the River Trent and through
Sawley Cut, calm home of the large Sawley Marina and its boats, before reaching the Trent & Mersey Canal.
Derwent Mouth Lock ingeniously tames the river into a canal. This unassuming spot marks the start of a 93-mile canal that once carried the fortunes of Josiah Wedgwood and his pots and made James Brindley the most applauded canal engineer in the era of canal mania. Travelling through Shardlow, history abounds as old warehouses stand with pride along the water’s edge, reflecting the importance this historic inland port once held.
Cargoes of the Industrial Revolution arrived on wide boats from the river to be unloaded into warehouses here before being reloaded on to narrowboats and transported along the canal. Shardlow has a heritage centre and over 50 listed buildings.
The canal wanders onward via bridges, locks and aqueducts until Burton-on-Trent where the National Brewery Centre explores the town’s famous brewing heritage. At its height, Burton had more than 30 breweries producing hundreds of thousands of barrels of ale each year. The ring carries on along the Trent & Mersey Canal until it meets the Coventry Canal at Fradley Junction, a hotspot for wildlife spotting with an award-winning nature reserve.
The ring now heads along the Coventry Canal. A stone by Bridge 78 at Whittington marks where the Coventry Canal changes to the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal – the result of a peculiar situation. The Coventry Canal Company ran out of money at Fazeley so the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal carries on for a couple of miles to the north-west of Fazeley Junction while the Coventry Canal heads north-east beyond the junction – though the company later managed to buy the section from Whittington through to Fradley Junction, now a stranded portion of the Coventry Canal. No mooring is allowed by the wooded hillside at Hopwas and danger flags mark the Whittington Firing Ranges. The route carries on through open landscapes to Fazeley Junction, where the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal heads off south towards Birmingham.
Crossing over the beautiful Grade II-listed Tame Aqueduct, the ring winds past Tamworth then Polesworth and the 11 Atherstone Locks. The Coventry then passes through a series of nature reserves and landscape formed from the spoil heaps of former quarries, the most dramatic of which is known as Mount Judd.
Winding through the suburbs of Nuneaton, the canal soon reaches Marston Junction where the Ashby Canal heads off to the east. Just beyond
Bedworth, Hawkesbury Junction is a busy place filled with boats and a photogenic former engine house. The Coventry Canal continues into Coventry, a worthy detour. The ruins of the original cathedral are a stark voice on the skyline of Coventry’s own ‘ground zero’ left from the horror of the Second World War. In the 1960s a light of hope was built in the new cathedral. A bond between these two buildings that lean side by side is a powerful and emotional paradox.
The ring now follows the Oxford Canal south-east from Hawkesbury Junction to Brinklow, a short walk south of Stretton Stop with a 13th-century church and the remains of a medieval castle built to defend the Fosse Way which crosses the canal here. The short Newbold Tunnel (250yd/229m) leads into Rugby, a place world-famous for a particular sport, then the distinctive paired Hillmorton Locks present boat crews with a challenge.
Now the ring joins the Grand Union