On to the Staffs and Worcester.

The rain stopped at 0700 and a lovely morning followed. I checked the level of oil in the gear box and then we were away.

Brewood Wharf is now home of Countrywide Cruisers. We hired a boat from here a good while ago. It looks like the original warehouse has been extended.

The church of St. Mary's and St. Chads at Brewood makes me think of the church at Braunston. Not quite os high on a hill but does indicate the approach of a junction.

There is a cutting, or 'valley' as the old boatmen called them, comes after Brewood and in the bright sunlight gives nice pools of dappled light.

Half way down the cutting is Avenue Bridge. It is a Grade II listed structure and is special as it cuts across the avenue leading to Chillington Hall. The estate has been in the same family for over 800 years. There have been three houses on the site but this one, Grade I Listed was built in 1724. The grounds were designed by Capability Brown around 1770.

Chillington Wharf is just the other side of the cutting and I assume served the Chillington Hall estate. There are plenty of moorings to be had nearby but very few boats moored there at the moment.

I'm not really sure why these narrows have been left in a couple of places between Brewood and Autherley but they remind me of the Llangollen but with no rocky sides. They aren't in very deep cuttings that may have been opened up tunnels.

As we pass under the M54 it is nice to see one of the original canal bridges too. The M54 was started in 1975 and costs £65 million, but is mainly dual carriageway. There are ideas to continue it through to Shrewsbury and also to link up with the M6Toll.

This little stop lock has been an added feature after construction and unusually has two gates instead of the more usual one.

A little further on is the Wolverhampton Boat Club, and below the foot bridge is another set of gates as a stop lock. Close by was an aerodrome during WWII. It was started in WWI but left until the start of the next war. It was built as a new fighter base but was only really used as an emergency landing ground for other nearby bases. An Advanced Training Base was also there and a big camp was built in the grounds for part of the Free Dutch Army. At the end of the war it was closed up but the army base was given over to a refugee camp for Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians until 1950. I wonder if the stop locks were added at the time of WWII in case the airfield was bombed and misses breached the canal. 

The toll house at Autherley Junction is still there but not too much made of it. In other places you would have lots of people coming to see the junction and the boats coming backwards and forwards along with the original buildings.

I'm not sure whether this was a later toll booth, or just a 'hovel' for the lock workers. Napton Narrow boats are installed in some of the other old buildings

The stop lock is just about 6" and after filling up with water and waiting for two boats to come through we worked through and turned right. We just went down the Staffs and Worcester and moored up before Oxley Marine. I hung the washing up and washed the other side of the boat. I was on a roll so I then went on to polish the st'bd side too. The first time this year. I have been using the Craftmaster carnuba wash liquid and I'm sure that it works very well, as there wasn't too much muck came off on the cloth but it really does look great now.