Last Sunday

I’ve just downloaded the photos from today’s walk, and what should I find, forgotten, on the camera, but last Sunday’s snaps.

Having seen Martin’s photos of his (and Sue’s) walking along the frozen surface of their local canal, it put me in mind to go and see what our canal was looking like after such a sustained period of cold weather. Our weather has been nowhere near as cold as the Manchester area, so I had no thoughts that we would be walking on water, but even so I wanted to see how frozen it was.

Waking up to the sound of rain on Sunday morning wasn’t a promising start, but our legs needed to be stretched, so off we went anyway – and it rained on us for most of the 7-mile route (although it did try to snow a few times too).

As we joined the Trent & Mersey along the river section there was, unsurprisingly, no ice to be seen (well, maybe a tiny bit clinging to the reeds).

Further along, just beyond this bridge, as the flow became less, the surface went from liquid to solid:

Soon later there were icebergs to be seen – looking suspiciously like a craft had passed through, breaking up the ice:

 

We’ve seen these two chaps quite a few times recently. It did make me chuckle when the smaller of the two fell off the ice, then climbed back on and gave her tail a nonchalant shake as if to say ‘I meant to do that…” 

There was a good build up of ice the walls and gate of this leaky lock (is there such a thing as a non-leaky lock?)

 

I’m not sure when a pond becomes a lake (is it only a matter of size, or does a lake have attributes that a pond doesn’t?), but I tend to refer to all of our local bodies of water as ponds even though some of them are quite large (the largest is over a quarter of a mile long). Anyway, all of the local ponds were frozen enough to support the weight of a body (not that I tested that theory, but by the footprints in the snow and in the absence of person-sized holes, I deduced that some people had walked out onto them):