Hail to the Hive!

As many of you already know we live on a little narrowboat cruising about the canals and rivers of the UK. Recently we returned to my hometown of Leicester for a visit and on the way went through one of my favourite canal destinations that I loved visiting way before I ever knew that I'd actually be living on the canls on a boat. This place is Foxton Locks and it's awesome.

We stayed in the immediate area for several weeks both at the top of the locks and also at the bottom. One morning I decided to get up early as the wether was pretty great and send the whirly bird up and get some good footage of the place from th air. It turned out to be one of my better ideas as the footage came out pretty darned good.

These locks were built in 1813 and have been in constant use since those days. It's actually pretty amazing that we are still using them today to travel about the canal and river network. Pretty old engineering but obviously very robust.

Foxton Locks are staircase locks meaning that one lock goes straight into the next with no separayion between them like in other flights of locks. There are 2 flights of 5 making 10 locks in total.

This enables boat traffic to traverse the landscape as it rises and falls and is pretty ingenious when you think about it and also quite incredible when you think that it was all dug out by hand over 200 years ago.