Martha's Marvellous Munchies

It had rained overnight and the morning was cool and damp, which is not a phrase that has had much use in this hot, drought-stricken summer. The change in weather was refreshing. This walk was the final link in the chain, closing the large loop which had taken me west and north along the River Dove, over the hills between Thorpe and Matlock, down the River Derwent, and finally along this short section of the River Trent. Or, in today's case, the Trent & Mersey Canal. St Mary's, Weston-on-Trent, stands all by itself down a little lane, with only a graveyard for company. And a good view. Some signs in the neat half-timbered porch suggested that the church was sometimes open, but today the door was locked. I continued down the lane. A footpath took me past the Ukrainian Social Club - an odd pub hidden in the woods by the canal. I crossed the canal on a footbridge with wonky railings and dropped down onto the towpath. Here I have a confession to make. This is not the point at w...

In the 1980s, the River Trent supplied the cooling water for fifteen coal-fired power stations, each one gobbling up coal from the local mines and quenching its heat with gallons of river water. The area was known as Megawatt Valley . As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, the mines closed, the coal trains stopped running, and the iconic cooling towers, one by one, fell to the ground. The high-voltage electricity lines which connected the stations to the grid are still there, however, and they dominated the walk I did today. The stately silhouettes of pylons stalked across the landscape, carrying fizzing power lines which sliced up the sky. At one point, I was within view of two of the remaining sets of cooling towers. Diving further back into history, I parked by Swarkestone Lock on the Trent & Mersey Canal, walked past St James' Church, and arrived at Swarkestone Bridge, a 14th-century causeway which still, remarkably, carries traffic today. It was famously the southernmos...