Follow the brown signs

 

I had no idea what the hell a boat lift was, well I knew it was probably a contraption to lift boats (duh), but as ever, I wanted to know all the whos, whys, whens and wheres, so I went right on in.

These very different pictures of the Anderton Boat Lift were taken first in it’s hay day during the industrial revolution in the late 1880s, and then one hundred years later during the 1980s when it was closed for 18 years due to corrosion caused by the salty waste from the salt mining factories upriver when it was declared structurally unsound, unfit for use and abandoned. I love stuff that’s a bit eery and weird (like the chunked up U-boat in Liverpool) and this picture of the abandoned boat lift makes me feel all scared and creeped out, so I really like it. It wasn’t enough to just look at the pictures or from the viewing platform though so I booked myself straight on a boat that takes down in the lift.

The trip turned out to be all a bit embarrassing. Usually on my random attraction visits there are only a few other geeks like me visiting these places and I don’t feel out of place on my own doing what I do, it helps that I make these trips in the middle of the day and during the week when most other normal people are at work so I don’t feel too much like an idiot while away from questioning eyes, but this particular attraction was apparently very popular and there were a lot of other people on it. Eeek, totally my worst thing. To make matters worse I was clearly the youngest visitor by about 38 years. Maybe it was for this reason that the skipper of the boat we were all going to be transported down the lift in directed his full commentary about the boat lift to me, and only me, throughout. Some of the old visitors even turned around and looked at me while he was talking it was so obvious. Being suspended 50 feet in the air between waterways in a canal boat made for a difficult if not impossible escape so I just had to deal with it and try to stop going red.

 

I would have liked to have spent more time at the brilliant visitor centre doing some interactive exhibits about how canal locks worked and seeing the way the hydraulic mechanism hoisted boats up and down between waterways. It also charts the really inspiring story of how the lift was saved from demolition by local enthusiast and engineering historians who could see that the loss of the Anderton Boat Lift meant this fascinating and ground breaking symbol of our world-leading industrial heritage would be accessibly only through photographs and strories, which over time would become lost and forgotten. As it was though I did as much skim reading as I could and grabbed armfuls of leaflets on the way out because when I’d parked an hour before in the attraction car park I hadn’t got any change for the car park and didn’t have any time before my boat trip to get any. As my luck with parking is pretty poor (getting massively extortionate parking tickets, contravening highway codes and being towed away outside pubs not infrequently) my priority was to speedily get my car out of that car park. Unbelievably I hadn’t got a ticket so I sped off as quick as I could in case a car park attendant was just about to lynch me, he wasn’t, I doubt they even had one. I did of course park up on a narrow bridge, making cars behind me wait, while I took pictures of the pretty canal as I left though. Renegade, I like living crazy.

 

I was impressed that there was a white tailed sea eagle there (left) which was half the reason my sister and I went up to Scotland recently to spot them. We definitely saw massive birds of prey up there but their numbers are still so low that I can’t be sure that we did actually see one, so it was nice to see this gigantic bird flying around and nearly taking everyone’s faces off when it flew low over the crowd (well, the 4 of us).