Stopped at Rushden and Diamonds

Thursday 26 July

It was a soggy sort of morning as we walked up to the village, about half a mile from the moorings. Irthlingborough is still suffering from the economic impact of the closure of the Doc Martens boot factory. A lot of the village shops are boarded up, and there seem to be a lot of hairdressers and fast food outlets. There is a hardware store, but it’s closing this weekend.

The main food shop is a small Tesco Express, but on the plus side, there’s a good butchers which also sells bread and some veg. It became apparent that no one in Irthlingborough drinks bitter – all the canned beers are lagers in all the shops that sell beer.

Back at the boat, I rang the EA at Peterborough and cancelled our crossing from Salter’s Lode to Denver for 1st August as it’s clear that we’re not going to make that.

The day passed chatting to the other moorers here: Gordon and Jan off Acorn, Scooby and Rita off Festina Lente, and Terry and Jan off Carpe Diem. We’re waiting to hear from the EA as to when the Strong Stream Advice is likely to come off. The river is going down still , but is apparently still quite high further down.

After lunch I did the blog. We heard from the EA that it’s to be at least another 48 to 72 hours before we can expect to get away. At about 8 in the evening, a boat actually came up the lock. It had been at Upper Ringstead when the river rose. Called Ours, it was looking for water and a pump out, and moored outside Patricia-May for the night.


Friday 27 July

For some reason I slept really badly last night. This made it all the more annoying that, having fallen asleep finally, I was woken at 4.45 by Ours starting up and boating off. I mean I know that they are probably keen to get off the river, but a word of warning the night before would not have come amiss.

It was, however, a sunny sort of morning. The river has risen a bit again, and it became apparent that we will be here for at least another two days. The consolation is that this is a much better place to be under the circumstances than Earls Barton. We have water, pump out and rubbish disposal, the company of some friendly and entertaining people, and there is even a chemist in the village at which I could get next month’s prescription made up. We just have to wait, possessing ourselves with patience, until we can go.

In the afternoon we took a walk around the water park that’s been made from the local gravel pits. It is a really good example of how to recover derelict land. There’s an assault course fit for larger kids and adults, and an adventure playground for the younger ones. In addition, there are a lot of quieter places to walk, bird watch and ride bikes from the hire shop in the central complex.

Coming back along the river, we could see that it’s still quite fast and high, so that we couldn’t attempt to get Sanity under some of the bridges.