Five miles east of Shardlow: Trent Lock at Long Eaton

I liked Shardlow, where the Derwent and the Trent and Mersey Canal join the River Trent. So yesterday I visited Trent Lock, five miles to the east, where the Erewash Canal and the River Soar join it.

The walk down the canal from Long Eaton station deserves a post of its own, but Trent Lock was also more interesting and attractive than I expected.

Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station dominates the view from the other side of the river, and I once named the Trent Viaducts, which take the Midland main line across it, as one of my five favourite bridges. Thee is a weir beneath them that boats heading north avoid by using the artificial Cranfleet Cut.

Their are two pubs and a tearoom by the lock where the canal enters the Trent. The Erewash (pronounced as three syllables, please) was built to serve the area's coal mines, and one day I will go to Great Northern Basin where it ends. 

That is also where the Cromford Canal once began its journey to the obvious new venue for Parliament.

The mouth of the River Soar is the other side of the river from Trent Lock, but easily seen thanks to a helpful narrow boat.

Let's leave the last word to Auden and Isherwood in the Dog Beneath the Skin (though I think these lines were lifted by the former from a contemporary topographical writer):

As at Trent Junction where the Soar comes gliding; out
of green Leicestershire to swell the ampler current.

Where the Trent and Mersey Canal and the Derwent join the Trent

Shardlow is not quite where the Trent and Mersey Canal meets the River Trent. The junction is about a mile east of the village.

The canal joins the river on the outside of a wide bend, The Derwent, which has journeyed from the Peak District through Cromford and Derby joins the Trent there too,

Just upstream, there is a bridge across the Trent,

Shardlow: A Derbyshire port

Shardlow is a fascinating place - an inland port built where the Trent and Mersey Canal met the River Trent. Goods were transshipped from river to canal and canal to river.

The village was filled with warehouses and canal arms and basins. Its only equivalent in Britain is Stourport-on-Severn in Worcestershire.

Today, most of the arms and basins have long since been filled in, but many warehouses remain. Some have found new business uses, some have been converted into housing, some are derelict.

I was there yesterday. Despite the fact that I must have visited it on a canal holiday when I was 11 - the last middle-class summer of my childhood - I felt not a twitch nor a flicker of familiarity. Memory is a strange thing.