Foxton Locks

Someone once complained that they never know which parts of my writing are true and which I have made up. A safe rule is that the more incredible something is, the more likely it is to be true.

So when I wrote on Comment is Free last year:

Back in the 1980s I spent a summer working for the Liberal party conference office. This being the old Liberal party, it was naturally housed in two semi-converted narrow boats moored deep in the Leicestershire countryside.

every word was true.

It was the 1985 Liberal Party Assembly, which was held at the Caird Hall in Dundee. And those boats were moored at Foxton, famous for its two staircases of locks and once the site of a remarkable inclined plane that lifted boats up the hillside in Edwardian days.

This was not the first time I had visited Foxton. The first time was on a canal holiday - I lived in Hertfordshire in those days - when I was 11. At that time you had to be that sort of age to find the remains of the inclinced plane as they were with covered with gorse bushes and no adult could penetrate the tunnels between them. That gorse has long since been cleared.

Over the years the remains have been cleaned up and interpreted half to death. I suppose it is progress of a sort, making their story accessible to more people, but as at Snailbeach I am glad I knew them in their undiscovered days.

In 1985 the Liberal Party Assembly office was moored in what had once been the arm taking boats to the bottom of the inclined plane. It was overhung with trees and easy to miss if you did not know it was there. When I saw it yesterday many of those trees had been felled and it had lost its mystery.

There are gains to the modern Foxton. I had a drink by the open fire in the Bridge 61 Free House, which feels like a miraculously surviving old pub but in reality has been open only for a couple of years.

The Foxton Locks Inn across the canal was a far more modest establishment in 1985 (when I think it was called the Bridge 61 - are you still with me?) and I am not sure it was a pub at all in the 1970s.