Pontcysyllte aqueduct

Moving on from Chirk the next day, we were in for some spectacular scenery, particularly the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct (above), which we had to go across the top of. We also crossed another smaller aqueduct as well as a 400 metre tunnel.

I have a fear of heights, and there was no railing on one side of the Pontcysyllte aqueduct - so I had a strong grip on the boat as I looked out over the side. We were up very high on the aqueduct, which overlooked a huge valley. It was an awesome sight - an amazing engineering feat considering it was built in the early 1800s.

Our destination that day was to be Llangollen. I was told by locals it should be pronounced with the LLs as KKs with a funny emphasis, hard to describe, on the KKs.

As usual we walked around out the town centre (very colourful but then, nearly all the towns in this part of the world are) before we decided on a pub for tea.

Llangollen appeared to be a large town going by the size of its city centre. I guess it’s not necessary to add that Llangollen is in Wales.

This was as far as the canal boat trip went. The remainder of the trip was a return to where we started; ie Wrenbury; So I won’t go into any detail on the return trip as it’s more of the same.

We had a good night to finish our canal boat experience at Wrenbury. At one of the two Wrenbury pubs, there was a trivial pursuit night which was more to our liking;. It had a wider range of questions, more than just entertainment.

The next morning, most of us went our separate ways; Some, off to the United States, others to France/Spain, Jordan & London, as well as Ireland where I ended up going with Peter Major.

We were going to catch the ferry from Holyhead in Wales to Dublin across the Irish Sea, but time was against us in making the ferry trip on the same day even though we had booked accommodation in Dublin that night. So we abandoned the idea of going by ferry & were able to book flights from Manchester to Dublin on the day after we finished the canal experience. We flew out of Manchester after catching a train there from Wrenbury  via Crewe.

Next: onto Ireland