Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
perience elsewhere is that country people are more sociable. Black Country friendliness will
be encountered on this canal and must be counted as one of its assets.
After a school and then Bug Hole Wharf in the vicinity of an electricity substation and
more schools, the canal runs through a section with factories but also with newer canalside
houses, which, from their expensive leaded windows, appear to be aimed at the more affluent
end of the housing market.
Unusual cemetery entrance off the towpath
.
The powerlines leave at Darlaston Green Wharf and the canal curves round to cross
an aqueduct over the railway, immediately before the weed-choked remains of the Anson
Branch. Over the next reach the canal is on a low embankment with a cemetery to the south
surrounding a church with a small spire. A little further on are two very large gas holders next
to the M6, but it is the busy motorway itself that is now prominent. Aqueducts take the canal
over a minor road and the fledgling River Tame, before the canal passes under the M6.
In this vicinity, the whole area is riddled with old coal mines. Heavy metal pollution from
former copper refining on the derelict site to the left of the canal has been a major problem in
the past, as drainage from polluted ground went into nearby headwaters of the River Tame.
The former factory here was one of two that were said to account for 18 per cent of the cop-
per and 17 per cent of the nickel found in the water at the Tame/Trent confluence.
The canal then moves on into the area of Pleck where a Sikh temple stands grandly next
to the water. After a public house by a bridge the route passes a former canal wharf building
