Mooring in Alrewas

There are a lot of things going for Alrewas, as regular readers will know; it's a lovely village, there's a medium sized Co-op and a good newsagent, and, of course, Coates the butcher. And that's before getting into the choice of pubs. But there are one or two things that don't work so well; there's nowhere to dump rubbish, and the signs asking you not to fly tip spoil a perfectly reasonable request by being inaccurate.

There is indeed rubbish disposal at Fradley, as advertised, but no longer at Barton Marina; in fact, the rubbish skips at Barton had long gone before those signs were put up. If you head for Barton, there's another inaccuracy, or damned lie as Maffi would no doubt put it. The signs that tell you not to look for skips at Barton say they've been moved to Oakamoor Cafe (true), 100 yards further along the canal (not true – it's a quarter of a mile away, which would be a bit of a bummer if you set out to walk it lugging a full bin bag).

Today, we walked to Fradley to unload some recycling (there are recycling skips in with the ordinary rubbish skips). This made a pleasant walk, but allowed us to clock another drawback; Fradley no longer offers diesel or pump out. They've been very unreliable for a while, but have now given up altogether. This means that the moorers at Hunts Lock now have the choice of Streethay (popular with Granny Buttons, but expensive) or Kings Bromley (nice place, but hard to get onto the pontoon in a cross wind, which there almost always is).

Or, of course, there's Barton Marina again, another place presenting boat handling challenges if it's windy.

Indeed, I'm not sure why BW still offers moorings at Hunts Lock; they are classic off side moorings of the kind that are supposed to be being reduced, and as there's no other reason to slow down on that stretch, you'd think they'd be in line for removal. Mind you, I know there are some very nice people moored there, so maybe I'd better shut up right now!

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